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August 14, two thousand seventeen 22 Comments Andrew Tate

Do you want to know one of the secrets that make Facebook the giant it is? The guys at Menlo Park never go on vacay!

In this August 2017, Facebook introduced some fresh ad targeting options, put a stop to slow-loading links, and is rolling out better reporting for movie re-shares and ad campaign metrics.

As always, we’ve done the hard work for you and collected all the top Facebook news you need to know right now.

Want more? Click read more then!

Here are the Ten Facebook Updates you can’t miss in August 2017:

Are you ready? Find a cozy spot, grab a drink and here we go!

1. Facebook will add event RSVPs as an ad targeting option.

Facebook plans to let advertisers send targeted ads to RSVPers of Facebook events.

This event-based targeting works by creating a Facebook Custom-made Audience of everyone who RSVP’d to an event created by the brand’s Facebook Page. Using the Custom-made Audience feature, brands can send a targeted campaign to the list of RSVPers and use the RSVP list to create a Facebook Lookalike audience of similar users.

With this RSVP targeting feature, brands will be able to include users who RSVP’d as “going,” users who RSVP’d as “interested,” or include both groups in their Custom-made Audience list.

Facebook events were already an effortless way for companies to promote their brand, but with this fresh RSVP ad targeting option, Facebook events will be an even better platform for building brand interest.

Two. Faster-loading links will be placed higher on mobile News Feeds.

Facebook announced that they will prioritize links that explosion quicker on mobile News Feeds, causing these stories to emerge more frequently at the top of the feed and slower stories to show up less often.

Users’ network connection, Wi-Fi capability, and device usage will be taken into consideration to estimate link geyser times and which News Feed content should be prioritized.

Facebook will roll out this update leisurely in the coming months. And if you’re worried about this update decreasing your webpage shares, check out Facebook’s guidelines for improving mobile site blast time.

Trio. Facebook has eliminated their apps Lifestage and Groups.

Facebook has shut down two of their stand-alone apps: Lifestage and Groups.

Introduced one year ago, Lifestage was designed for teenagers to connect with others at their school by creating personalized movie profiles. Users could also view movies made by others at their school.

The Facebook app Groups was a bit older than Lifestage, launching in November 2014. The app served as a space for users to access all of their Facebook groups in one place. Users could also create fresh Facebook Groups from the app.

With these app shutdowns, Facebook is honing in on their main Facebook app. In their responses to these app removals, the company explained that they’re focusing more on Groups in the main Facebook app, and plan to incorporate their learnings from Lifestage into the main Facebook app.

Four. Facebook is updating their clicks and ad impression reporting.

To give companies a clearer understanding of their ad spectacle, Facebook has updated its reporting on clicks and ad impressions.

Facebook will no longer be counting unintentional clicks in campaign metrics and will not be charging for unintentional clicks in Audience Network, its platform for Facebook to run ads in other apps. Explaining this update, Facebook Product Marketing Manager Brett Vogel noted that, “unintentional clicks end up delivering truly poor practices for people and advertisers.”

To determine if a click is unintentional, Facebook measures the “drop off rate” — the time a user spends on an ad’s landing page. Facebook identifies spending less than two seconds on an ad as an unintentional click.

Facebook has also updated their ad impression reporting to give businesses more clarity on their total number of ad impressions with two fresh metrics:

• Gross impressions: this metric now measures both billable and non-billable ad impressions. Non-billable impressions include ads delivered after a company’s budget was spent, ads served to the same user in a brief time, and ad delivery due to detectable fraud.
• Auto-refresh impressions: this metric indicates the number of ad impressions due to a browser refresh. Ads that are placed on the right-hand side of a user’s desktop News Feed automatically refresh with fresh ads after a set period of time.

With these fresh metrics, Facebook is suggesting more transparency about ad delivery, permitting users to feel certain about the value of their ad impressions.

Five. Facebook is updating movie re-share metrics to give creators better insights.

After gathering user feedback, Facebook learned that movie creators desired more metrics on re-shares of their content as well as limitations on the amount of metrics movie re-sharers could see. In response, Facebook made some updates to movie re-share metrics:

• Only movie creators will be able to see the following metrics: retention graph, average witness time, thirty Seconds Views and detailed breakdown of views (autoplay/click to play, unique/repeat). Minutes viewed, ten Seconds Views and sound metrics will soon only be available to creators as well.

• Page owners who re-share movies will be permitted to see the following metrics: aggregated information about the demographics, general location of the people who are viewing that movie, daily views of the re-shared movie, and extra breakdowns on paid versus organic movie activity.
• Facebook will be adding insights for movie creators on which Pages are re-sharing their movie, however they have not specified the insights yet.

With these re-share metric updates, users will be able to form stronger insights about their posting strategy and content creation.

6. Facebook announced their 2nd Quarter two thousand seventeen results.

Facebook reported strong 2nd quarter results with sales growth that surpassed analysts’ estimates. The positive report can be attributed to the enhancing request for Facebook’s mobile ads and Facebook’s success in consistently bringing on fresh users through its suite of apps.

• Revenue rose 45% to $9.32 billion from $6.43 billion in last year’s 2nd quarter.
• Mobile ad revenue represented 87% of total ad sales, up from 84% in the same period last year.
• Profits enlargened 71% to $Trio.89 billion from last year’s 2nd quarter profit of $Two.28 billion.
• Daily active users were 1.32 billion on average and monthly active users were two billion on average — both metrics showcased a 17% year-over-year increase.

Facebook stated that “ad load” (the number of ads Facebook shows users) will become less of a revenue growth source this year. For future revenue growth sources, analysts predict that Facebook’s long-term investments in messaging and virtual reality will become substantial revenue rivulets.

7. Facebook is testing “going live” features from Facebook Camera.

To make it lighter for users to go live with movie and audio, Facebook is releasing a test version of Facebook Movie that includes the abilities to record live audio and movie, and to make GIFs.

With this fresh test version of Facebook Movie, the functions “Live,” “Normal,” and “GIF” will emerge as tabs across the top of the screen.

On the “Live” tab, you can tap on a movie camera icon to live stream movie or a microphone icon to live stream audio.

Plus, you’ll now be able to choose whether you want to go live in just your Facebook Stories, as a regular Facebook post, or both.

For now, these Facebook Movie live features are only being tested and have not been fully spinned out to users.

8. Facebook is testing adding Stories to the desktop site.

As a test, Facebook Stories will now be available on the desktop site to some users on the right side of the News Feed.

Emulating Snapchat, Facebook Stories is a feed of friends’ pictures and movies from the last twenty four hours.

Facebook had already included Stories in their main mobile app, but so far the feature hasn’t received too much attention. In April, Facebook Stories attempted to encourage users to add to their story more by greying out icons of users who weren’t using the feature, but Facebook Stories still hasn’t fairly caught on.

Facebook hasn’t confirmed the percentage of users that are eyeing Stories on their desktop for this test, so it’s unclear for now as to whether adding Facebook Stories to desktop will increase its usage.

9. Facebook is rolling out more Messenger ads globally.

After running limited tests that introduced ads to Facebook Messenger’s home tab, Facebook has announced that it’s expanding a test of home tab ads in the Messenger app globally.

Facebook has stated that they will step by step increase the number of consumers who will be able to see the ads in the Messenger home tab.

Once clicked on, the fresh Messenger home tab ads will either lead users to a website or work like the older Click to Message ads, which begin a message thread inbetween the user and the company when clicked.

Ads represent a major chunk of Facebook’s revenue, so it makes sense that Facebook is adding Messenger home tab ads (there’s only so much News Feed ad space). Users may find the ads alongside their individual messages on the Messenger home tab too intrusive, but if so they will be given the option to hide ads by clicking on the ad’s bottom right downward arrow.

Ten. Facebook is introducing two fresh movie platforms, Witness and Display Pages.

Facebook is substituting its old Movie tab with a fresh platform called Witness, a space for Facebook users to see shows. Shows on Facebook are published movie series of scenes, live or recorded.

Witness will have a Watchlist feature to help users keep track of the shows that they go after, plus Observe will organize shows into personalized sections, like “What Friends are Watching,” to help users detect fresh shows. Users will also be able to connect with other viewers by commenting and reacting to shows or by joining dedicated Facebook Groups for shows.

Witness is presently only available to a limited group of people in the US on mobile, desktop, and Facebook TV apps, but will be released to more people in the US in the coming weeks.

As a complement to Witness, Facebook is also releasing Showcase Pages, which are Pages for users to publish fresh showcase gigs, information about the demonstrate, and related movies.

With these Demonstrate Pages, users will lightly be able to connect with the communities forming around each display.

Quick Recap:

Let’s review the most significant Facebook news in August 2017:

In case you missed the top news in previous months, scroll down to read about them!

Top Facebook Updates That You Can’t Afford to Miss – July two thousand seventeen Edition

In July 2017, Facebook introduced joy features for Messenger movie talk, added updates to Safety Check and it is providing Group admins more control over their communities.

As always, we’ve done the hard work for you and collected all the top Facebook news you need to know right now. So sit back, grab an iced espresso and click read more!

Here’s a quick overview of the most significant Facebook news in July 2017:

Ready? Let’s go then

1. Group admins will have more control over their communities.

Facebook is adding several features to help Group admins manage their members and grow their teams.

The fresh contraptions will provide admins with a better understanding of member activity and more control over Group membership and posting.

The updates include:

• Group insights — Admins will be able to see real-time metrics about growth, engagement and membership, like the total number of Group posts and most popular times of member engagement.
• Membership request filtering — Membership requests will be sorted into categories like gender or location, so admins can accept or decline requests by categories all at once.
• Liquidated member clean-up — Admins will be able to liquidate Group members and their created content in one step.
• Scheduled posts — Group admins and moderators will be able to create and schedule posts.
• Group to group linking — Facebook is testing group-to-group linking, which permits admins to suggest similar groups to their members.

With their fresh community-oriented mission, Facebook plans to proceed developing instruments for supporting Group admins.

Two. Facebook Messenger’s Detect tab went live.

After announcing Detect at F8, Facebook has flipped out v 1.1 for users in the US.

With Detect, users can interact with bots, places, and businesses on Messenger. You can browse by category, recently visited businesses and featured practices.

Facebook wrote on their company blog:

Detect makes it even lighter to get things done, from reading the latest articles, booking your next vacation, or getting the latest sport highlights, right in Messenger.”

What this means for advertisers:

According to Marketing Land, the “recently used” category on Detect will only include businesses that users have messaged, not businesses that users have followed on Facebook Pages or other social media platforms.

This means that businesses will need to promote their Messenger accounts with ads and hope that their accounts are featured in other categories, like topic-related sections and the “Featured” practices.

Three. Messenger Ads are Going Global

If you’re reading us from Australia or Thailand we’re not telling you anything fresh, but if you live anywhere else on this planet you can get ready to add a fresh implement to your marketing arsenal: Messenger Ads!

After more than one year of testing, now businesses around the world can extend their reach to people in Messenger. Are 1.Two billion monthly Messenger users enough for you?

Messenger ads will display up with a “sponsored” label in the home tab of Messenger mobile app and they look like a typical News Feed ads with a headline, description copy, photo and calls to act. When users tap on an ad, they will be sent to the destination you selected when creating the ads (your website or a Messenger chatbot).

You’ll find Messenger ads as a placement option, and if you’re using automatic placements Messenger is included for all supported campaign objectives. Messenger ads are available in Ads Manager and Power Editor and advertisers will be able to add Messenger to campaigns using the Traffic and Conversion objectives.

In the next few weeks, more options are rolling out, the guys at Facebook ensure that App Installs and other campaign objectives will be supported “soon.”

Four. Find Wi-Fi around the world (and find your business too)

After being released to several countries last year, Find Wi-Fi is now available worldwide.

The device permits users to find the closest Wi-Fi hot catches sight of based on businesses who have collective their Wi-Fi through their Facebook Page.

To access “Find Wi-Fi,” they only need to open the Facebook app, click on the “More” tab and then “Find Wi-Fi.” They can also search through the map to find available hotspots and learn more details about the businesses providing Wi-Fi.

Do we indeed have to tell you all the benefit that your free Wi-Fi can give to your business?

Five. Facebook will suggest fresh metrics for Ad and Page insights.

Facebook has announced the fresh metrics they will be releasing for businesses over the next few weeks.

These metrics are designed to give companies a better understanding of user interactions with their Facebook Ads and Pages.

Here are the fresh metrics on ad interactions:

• Landing page views — Shows the number of visitors who reached your website after clicking on an ad.
• Pre-impression activity breakdown — Shows whether visitors have been to your website previously.

With these two metrics, businesses can determine if ads are successfully leading users to their sites and attracting fresh customers.

Here are the fresh metrics on Page interactions:

• Goes after —Shows the number of goes after a business gains or loses, insights into where goes after happen, follower demographics and a breakdown of organic and paid goes after.
• Previews —Shows the number of people who see your Page’s information without actually clicking on it.
• Recommendations —Shows the number of times your Page is included in a Facebook recommendation

Facebook plans on releasing more fresh metrics every month based on the feedback they get on these metrics. Just make sure your treatment is data-informed, not data-driven!

6. Facebook News Feed algorithm was updated to reduce spam.

Facebook has switched their News Feed algorithm to reduce the amount of spam on users’ News Feeds.

Unlike Facebook’s clickbait targeting updates last month, this algorithm update will detect spammers by the total number of posts, not by individual post content. According to Tech Times, Facebook identifies anyone sharing fifty or more posts per day as someone who is most likely sharing spam or fake news.

In a June thirty blog post, Facebook representatives said that:

“Our research further shows that the links they share tend to include low quality content such as clickbait, sensationalism, and misinformation. As a result, we want to reduce the influence of these spammers and deprioritize the links they share more frequently than regular sharers.”

For now, this de-prioritization rule only applies to posts with links, not domains, Pages, movies, photos, check-ins or status updates.

But there’s more!

Do you usually switch the title or the pic when you share a link on Facebook? Well, kicking off July seventeen (and for the next #wedontknowhowmany weeks), you will not able to do it anymore. Facebook is removing the capability to edit a link preview – its photo, title, and text – before sharing a link on the platform.

Are you mad? Well, then send a thank you note to all those spammers, scammers, and clickbaiters that have been using link preview editing as a way to post false news.

What if your workflow relies on overwriting link preview metadata? Facebook announced that they’re working to find a solution and, in the next few weeks, will provide publishers with “tools and resources” to support them. Waiting for a solution, there are a few tricks that you can use right now.

7. Fresh profile picture contraptions were launched in India.

Facebook’s research demonstrated that some users don’t post a profile picture because they worry it will be misused online.

To help users feel more convenient posting profile pictures, the company is testing fresh protective profile picture instruments in India.

The very first contraption is an optional profile picture guard. With this feature, users are able to:

• restrict others from downloading, sharing or sending your profile picture in a Facebook message
• restrict others from taking screenshots of your profile picture (presently only available on Android app)
• restrict non-Facebook friends from tagging others or themselves in your profile picture

The optional guard also adds a blue layer and shield to your profile picture to signal protection to other users.

The 2nd instrument is the option to add a design layer to profile pics.

According to tests, people are 75% less likely to copy a profile picture with a design layer.

Inspired by Indian textile patterns, such as Bandhani and Kantha, illustrator Jessica Singh created the designs for Indian users to add to their profile pictures. Can you imagine a future where thousands of users will pick your designs for their profile picture?

8. Facebook Safety Check got numerous updates.

Speaking of Facebook’s commitment to communities, the company is rolling out several updates to Safety Check.

Safety Check has always permitted users to let family and friends know they are okay during moments of crisis. Now, Safety Check will also include:

• Fundraisers —Users in the US will now be able to begin a fundraiser through Safety Check.
• Community Help — The Community Help feature is now available on desktop and will be available for all types of crises where Safety Check is activated.
• Adding individual notes — To keep friends and family updated, users can now add private notes that are automatically added to their News Feed story.
• Crisis descriptions — Safety Check now includes info about crises from the global crisis reporting agency NC4.

Facebook very first released Safety Check two years ago. For the past two years, Safety Check has been activated more than six hundred times and has sent more than a billion safety notifications. It’s already a powerful device, and the fresh features will only make connecting with users lighter.

9. Facebook Messenger introduced fresh joy movie features.

Until now, movie talking on Messenger has been pretty bare-bones. Recently, Facebook added several features to amp up the joy factor.

These fresh devices permit you to add animated reactions, filters, masks, and effects to movie talks, and take screenshots of your talks.

Here are a few pro-tips for using the fresh movie talking features:

• Emojis — When you add emojis to animate on your movie screen, witness closely! The effects switch depending on whether your face is on or off screen.
• Filters —Not sure if you look good? Test the filter before letting others see it.
• Masks — Some of the masks have hidden effects when you stir. Attempt opening your mouth with the rabbit mask…

For Messenger movie talk users, the fresh emojis, masks, and filters should inspire some laughs from friends and family. For business, they will make your interaction way more individual. Flawless for connecting to millennials, it needs to be used with care with the rest of your audience.

Quick recap:

Take another sip of your iced espresso and let’s review the most significant Facebook news in July 2017:

In case you missed the top news in previous months, scroll down to read about them!

Top Facebook Updates That You Can’t Afford to Miss – June two thousand seventeen Edition

In this June 2017, Facebook introduced some fresh ad formats, ramped up its battle against clickbait, and it is (eventually) providing advertisers more control over their ad placements. As always, we’ve done the hard work for you and collected all the top Facebook news you need to know right now.

Here’re the 12 Facebook Updates you can’t miss in June 2017:

1. Advertisers Get More Control Over Ad Placements

Facebook will launch some fresh implements to provide advertisers more control over their ad placements in Audience Network, Instant Articles and In-Stream Ads.

Over the next few months, the ad network will launch extra controls to let advertisers exclude some ad placements by blocking lists of publishers & apps.

According to a blog article by Facebook:

We will begin suggesting upfront, publisher-level transparency across the Audience Network, Instant Articles and in-stream ads on Facebook.”

• Higher pre-campaign transparency – Advertisers will be able to see a list of where their ads could potentially produce prior to setting a campaign live
• Blocking placements at the account level – It will be lighter to prevent ads from appearing in undesirable places by applying block lists at the account level
• Choice over movie placements in Facebook Audience Network – Advertisers will get a choice of the types of movie placements and the formats (e.g. in-stream, native, and interstitial) they can use

The social network will proceed to build the implements advertisers need to make them feel sated with the level of transparency and control they have over their ad campaigns.

Two. You Can Now Create Full-Width Ads for the Audience Network

On May 25, Facebook announced that they’re adding a fresh full-width ads format for Facebook Audience Network, its mobile advertising network.

According to a Facebook’s explore, full-width ads enlargened the ads’ user engagement (CTR) by 58% and monetization (CPM) by 34%.

The fresh full-width ad format is now available to all mobile web publishers on Audience Network through header bidding.

Trio. Facebook Will Have Stricter Rules Against Clickbait

To help its users see fewer clickbait stories and find more authentic ones, Facebook recently made three fresh updates.

Clickbait targeting is now done on an individual post level, not only on the domain and page level. To make the decrease of clickbait more effective, Facebook will look separately whether a post’s headline withholds or exaggerates information.

Moreover, to clean up its social network, all of these algorithm updates are also tested in foreign languages. At the moment, Facebook can detect and downrank clickbait headlines in German, Arabic, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Thai, Vietnamese, and Chinese as well as English.

For advertisers and publishers, the update could mean that posting clickbait news isn’t a good strategy for engaging a large Facebook audience.

Instead, we suggest that you concentrate on creating value for your audience above any other objective.

Four. Facebook Is Testing Video-format Cover Photos

For some time now, Facebook has collaborated with selected brands to test using video-format cover photos.

As reported by AdWeek, Facebook has been working with Netflix and Flixel Photos to experiment with the fresh cover photo style.

Presently, the video-format cover pic isn’t available to all brands. However, once the fresh feature will be spinned out globally, you should go after these specs to create a successful cover movie:

1. Cover movies must be at least twenty seconds long, but no more than ninety seconds long
2. The recommended movie crop size is eight hundred twenty pixels by four hundred sixty two pixels
3. Cover movies should auto-play and auto-loop
4. Page admins can upload cover movies the same way they presently upload cover photos

Five. You Can Optimize Who Sees Your Facebook Posts

While this feature’s been available for some time now, we figured you may have missed the chance.

Every time you publish a fresh Facebook post, you’ll be able to use the Audience Optimization, to ensure the right people will see your Facebook page posts.

Once you click on the Audience Optimization icon when publishing a Facebook page post, a fresh pop-up window will show up.

You’ll be able to select which interests you’d like to particularly target with this specific post.

For example, AdEspresso was to share a Facebook Advertising Guide on AdEspresso’s Facebook page, they could optimize this post’s audience by targeting “Facebook advertising” and “Advertising” interests.

If your Facebook page has more than Five,000 likes, the Audience Optimization has already been activated and the implement should be available for you to use.

If your page has fewer than Five,000 likes, here’s what to do:

• Click the “Settings” tab in the top right corner of your Facebook page
• From the “General” tab, you’ll see a row for “Audience Optimization for Posts”
• Click on “Edit” and check the box to activate the Audience Optimization
• Then, go with the “Save Changes” button.

6. Facebook Added Fresh Canvas Ads Templates & Other Updates

On June 7, AdWeek reported that Facebook introduced three fresh templates for Canvas Ads: Get Fresh Customers, Sell Products and Showcase Your Businesses.

Here’s a brief overview of each fresh Canvas Ads format:

1. Get Fresh Customers – Bring your stories from websites and landing pages over to Canvas to nurture interest in a friction-free style and drive customers to convert.
2. Sell Products – Enable discovery and purchase of products and services in a visual and immersive way.
3. Showcase Your Business – Drive brand awareness by combining the power of engaging movies and photos.

Moreover, Facebook Canvas Ads can now be included in Collection Ads.

On top of that, it will be lighter to create fresh Canvas Ads as Facebook will automatically pull all pictures from your landing pages, along with their associated destination links.

7. You Can Now Create Value-based Lookalike Audiences

Facebook recently introduced two fresh solutions that help advertisers to target users who are more likely to take valuable deeds after interacting with their campaigns.

According to a blog post by Facebook, the value optimization works by using the purchase values sent from the Facebook pixel to estimate how much a person may spend with your business over a seven-day period. Your ad’s bid is then automatically adjusted based on this estimation, permitting campaigns to supply ads to people likely to spend more with your business at a low cost.

Moreover, you can now create Lookalike Audiences based on Custom-built Audiences that include the data about your customers’ expected lifetime value.

The fresh Facebook advertising features will be spinned out globally in the upcoming months.

8. Facebook Live Is Getting Numerous Updates

To filter the visual spam and have more meaningful and individual reactions to Live movies, Facebook flipped out a few innovative solutions in the past month: Live Talk with Friends and Live With.

In addition to the Live Talk with Friends feature that permits users to have private conversations during their live broadcasts, Facebook is launching a feature that will let you go live with another friend in a side-by-side conversation. This feature was previously available to public figures, but now, it’s rolling out worldwide, permitting you to argue or talk with friends in a Live setting.

As reported by TechCrunch, the social network is already testing this feature in a few countries and it will be more widely available later this summer.

For advertisers, the fresh Live With feature could present a fresh set of opportunities for broadcasting interviews, courses or webinars right in the Facebook news feed.

9. Facebook Added GIFs Into Comments

As ofJune 15, every Facebook user can use GIFs in the comments.

This feature was added to feast the 30th anniversary of the GIF format. Marketers can search GIFs by using different services, like Giphy and Tenor, then post them in the comments box, in Facebook Messenger or in status updates.

As stated by TheVerge, the busiest day for GIFs was evidently January 1st this year, with more than four hundred million GIFs sent.

Ten. Facebook Messenger Just Got a Facelift

Facebook spinned out a visual update to Messenger for improving navigation across the application.

The fresh Messenger home screen still has its Stories feature and Messenger Day, but the emphasis is placed on connecting with all the people and businesses more quickly.

At the top bar, there are tabs for Messages, Active, and Groups. The bottom bar features tabs for Home, Calls, People, and Games. Facebook also added a crimson dot that will help to catch up on unseen messages, calls and any other fresh activity.

According to Facebook’s Head of Messenger David Marcus, Messenger will soon have a fresh, Detect tab, also located at the bottom bar. These switches simplify messaging and the Messenger home screen leisurely starts to make sense again.

11. Facebook Introduced Fresh Photo Album Features

As reported by AdWeek, Facebook announced an album utter of updates to its photo album feature,

Facebook photo albums now also support movies, check-ins, and text posts. Moreover, people can exhibit their dearest album on their profile page by using the Featured Albums implement.

According to TechCrunch, the fresh feature essentially lets you create digital scrapbooks of all kinds of content. That raises the question of whether Facebook will commence letting you create, print, and buy physical photo books the way Google does now.

12. Facebook Trending Topics Now Display More Stories

At the end of May, Facebook introduced a redesigned Trending results page.

Now, when clicking through to a Trending Topic, Facebook will showcase you a carousel of the other most popular articles written about the subject by different publishers.

Facebook product manager Ali Ahmadi and designer John Angelo wrote in a blog post:

“By making it lighter to see what other news outlets are telling about each topic, we hope that people will feel more informed about the news in their region.”

Right now, people can see the fresh results page on iPhone in the US. However, Facebook’s planning to make it available on Android and desktop soon.

Furthermore, Facebook announced that it is making its Instant Articles platform adaptable with Google AMP and Apple News. So, if you build once in Instant Articles, it is lighter to use them on other platforms and stylizing the article won’t be a problem anymore.

Quick Overview

Congratulations! You’ve reached the end of this month’s Facebook news broadcast.

Here’s a quick recap of everything you just read:

In case you missed some of the past months’ Facebook updates, scroll down to read all of them! But very first, leave us a comment

Top Facebook Updates That You Can’t Afford to Miss – May two thousand seventeen Edition

So here they are – the top Facebook updates in May 2017:

1. Facebook held the F8 conference
2. Facebook advanced its marketing analytics
3. There are now 1.94 billion monthly active users on Facebook
4. You can now play games in the Messenger app
5. Facebook is cleaning up the News Feed
6. Facebook Dynamic Ads are now even more powerful
7. You can now ask entry questions for Facebook Groups

Ready to see how you can benefit from all these updates?

1. Facebook held the F8 conference

The F8 conference was clearly the thickest Facebook news in April.

During the 2-day conference, Facebook introduced some earnestly arousing fresh products and collective their future plans with thousands ofeager listeners.

A lot of emphasis was placed on the development of VR and AI products, including the launch of a fresh Camera Effects platform and a VR app named Facebook Spaces.

In case you totally missed out on the conference, we’re going to cover some if the most significant announcements right away.

We also covered the F8 conference here on AdEspresso’s blog. Read the total coverage here: Facebook F8 two thousand seventeen – What Marketers Need to Know

Two. Facebook advanced its marketing analytics

Facebook’s ad reporting is already one of the most insightful and accurate paid advertising measurement contraptions.

By tracking the right Facebook ad metrics, you’ll be able to optimize your campaigns and improve both your ads’ click-through rates and acquisition costs.

Now, advertisers can track the Facebook Page interactions, such as post reactions and shares in the omnichannel analytics for websites, applications, services, and bots.

For example, an e-commerce business can measure if people who comment on an item featured in their Page post go on to view that item on their website or purchase it in their app.

But there’s more to it: Facebook also introduced a fresh AI-powered Automated Insights contraption that’s especially beneficial to larger advertisers who need to segment their target audiences.

If you’re marketing a product that’s sold in physical stores, the fresh multi-channel analytics can help you better realize the ROI of your campaigns.

Learn more about the Facebook Analytics multi-channel tracking here.

Three. There are now 1.94 billion monthly active users on Facebook

On May Trio, Facebook released its very first quarter earnings report.

As a Facebook advertiser, you can rest assured – the social media platform’s not going anywhere.

As reported by The Edge, the social media platform brought in just over $8 billion in revenue, a hop of forty nine percent since the very first quarter of 2016.

Moreover, the number of Facebook’s monthly active users has grown by 17% compared to the very first quarter of 2016. And so has Instagram’s: the company just announced that it hit the milestone of seven hundred million monthly active users.

This is good news for anyone looking to reach a large audience of potential customers via paid social media advertising.

Four. You can now play games in the Messenger app

On May Two, Facebook announced that its fresh Messenger game-playing feature is now available to 1.Two billion people using the app every month.

The fresh games feature, named Instant Games, is available on Messenger and Facebook News Feed for both mobile and web.

According to Facebook, the fresh games practice permits people to lightly detect, share, and play games without having to install fresh apps.

The gaming platform also lets game makers create turn-based plays, to integrate leaderboards and tournaments.

Right now, there are fifty different titles to play, from Pac-Man to eight Ball Pool.

As reported by TechCrunch: For now, there are no ads or in-game purchases available, so neither Facebook nor developers are making money on the Instant Games platform just yet.

What this means for advertisers:

The Messenger games could also provide awesome branding opportunities for advertisers. In fact, there are already some branded games like The LEGO Batman Movie’s Bat Climb on the platform.

Five. Facebook is cleaning up the News Feed

Due to the latest problem of fake news, Facebook’s taking extra steps to clean up our News Feeds from low-quality ads and posts.

In a blog update published on May Ten, Facebook’s representatives told that:

“Starting today, we’re rolling out an update so people see fewer posts and ads in News Feed that link to these low-quality web page practices. Similar to the work we’re already doing to stop misinformation, this update will help reduce the economic incentives of financially-motivated spammers.”

Facebook analyzed hundreds of thousands of web pages linked to from Facebook to identify those that contain little substantive content and have a large number of disruptive, shocking or malicious ads.

What this means for advertisers:

The switches will roll out step by step over the upcoming months.

If you’re promoting high-quality landing pages with nothing spammy, you may even see a petite increase in traffic as you can potentially be rivaling with fewer advertisers for your audience’s attention.

6. Facebook Dynamic Ads are now even more powerful

Facebook Dynamic Ads let advertisers create remarketing ads based on the person’s browsing history on a website.

For example, if a person visits an eCommerce website, they could be retargeted with a multi-product ad of the exact products they looked at.

With the latest update, you can highlight up to twenty photos from a catalog to represent a single item across the carousel ad format used with Dynamic Ads.

This means that you can advertise a single item such as a chunk of clothing, recipe, hotel or destination with numerous photos, making your remarketing ads even more efficient.

If you don’t have a large product catalog and aren’t using the Dynamic Ads, you might still be interested in our guide to the best Facebook (remarketing) audiences.

7. Fresh entry questions for Facebook Groups

If you’re an admin of one or several Facebook groups, the following might be a nice surprise for you!

You can now setup up to three questions for people requesting to join their Group to response.

As reported by TechCrunch, this lets admins screen potential members to ensure they’re the right fit for the group and will add constructively to the discussion, not just spam or troll the Group.

The answers and questions will only be seen by admins and moderators (don’t worry, no answers will be posted to the group).

If you’re managing a branded Facebook community, this could also be a good chance to ask about your audience’s interests and expectations, so that you can have even better discussions in the future.

Quick recap

You’ve reached the end of this month’s news broadcast.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing – it means you can now go and apply your fresh skill to your Facebook ad campaigns.

Just in case, here’s a quick overview of the top Facebook news in May 2017:

1. Facebook held the F8 conference
2. Facebook advanced its marketing analytics
3. There are now 1.94 billion monthly active users on Facebook
4. You can now play games in the Messenger app
5. Facebook is cleaning up the News Feed
6. Facebook Dynamic Ads are now even more powerful
7. Fresh entry questions for Facebook Groups

If you’d like to read even more about the latest updates, see our article on the F8 conference.

And in case you missed the top news in April, scroll down to read about them!

Top Facebook Updates That You Can’t Afford to Miss – April two thousand seventeen Edition

If you’re able to uncover a fresh awesome targeting method or use GIFs in your Movie Ads before anyone else, you’ll win big. Are you ready to win big this month?

Here’s a quick overview of Facebook updates in April 2017:

Alright, let’s see how each of these updates can help you engage with your Facebook audiences and increase sales.

1. Facebook added fresh insights to ad reports

The reports you see in the Facebook Ads Manager, displaying your campaign results and helping to optimize campaigns, just got an update.

Facebook is making your predicted ad results more semi-transparent with Delivery Insights and Estimated Daily Results.

The redesigned Delivery Insights dashboard now features an updated interface that provides in-depth auction metrics and helps to interpret the fluctuations in your campaign spectacle.

The fresh auction overlap implement will help you interpret whether overlapping audiences inbetween ad sets might be affecting your spend and audience saturation.i

In addition to that, Facebook also updated their ad results prediction, providing advertisers a better overview of future campaign results. When setting up campaign budgets, you can now see a table with predicted ad delivery and reach.

Two. Facebook introduced a fresh in-app camera

If you’re still not 100% persuaded that Facebook believes in live movie and Messenger Day, read this:

You can now tap on the camera icon on the top left corner of your Facebook mobile app or swipe right from News Feed to attempt out Facebook’s fresh in-app camera.

The Facebook in-app camera is packed with dozens of effects like masks, frames and interactive filters that you can apply to your photos and movies – to make them more joy.

What this means for advertisers:

Facebook’s also partnering with brands to create masks for upcoming movies Alien: Covenant, Despicable Me Trio, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. Two, Power Rangers, Smurfs: The Lost Village and Wonder Woman.

But Facebook has even thicker plans for their fresh camera.

According to Connor Hayes, Product Manager:

“Over the coming months, we plan to introduce fresh ways for the Facebook community to create their own frames and effects that can be used on any photo or movie created with the fresh Facebook camera. Our aim is for the camera to be a home to hundreds of dynamic and joy effects that give you fresh ways to connect with friends, family, and your community.”

We’re excited to see how clever brands can use the fresh features to their advantage!

Three. Fresh Message Reactions for Facebook Messenger

On March 23, Drew Moxon, Product Manager, Messenger, wrote on Facebook’s blog that they’ve added two fresh features that improve group conversations to make them more joy and useful.

The fresh feature is called Messenger Reactions.

Message Reactions let people react to individual messages with specific emotions – love, smile, wow, sad, angry, yes, and no.

This lets people to quickly showcase acknowledgment or express how they feel about a particular message.

You’ll be able to see how people have reacted to a message in the lower corner of the message. If you don’t presently have the Messenger open, you’ll receive a notification that lets you know who (and how) reacted to your messages.

There’s another fresh feature in Facebook Messenger – Mentions.

To mention someone, type the “@” symbol or commence typing the very first letters of a person’s name you want to notify. Next, select them from the list.

When you’re mentioned, instead of simply witnessing that someone responded in the conversation, you’ll receive a special notification telling you were called out specifically.

In fact, Facebook’s so in with emojis that this year, they want to award advertisers whose ads have stirred emotions.

As reported by AdAge, Facebook’s switching its ad awards this year, asking agencies for their best work in categories named Laugh, Sob, Wow, Love and Act, mimicking the react button options on Facebook posts.

You can submit your entries here.

Four. Facebook Messenger got a fresh Live Location feature

On March 27, Facebook introduced a improvised live location sharing feature inwards Messenger, letting friends and family track your movements an hour at a time.

This could be handy when you’re late to a meetup, letting your friends know you’re on your way.

How the Live Location feature works:

1. To share your Live Location in a message on iOS, tap the Location icon or tap the More icon and then select Location. For Android, tap the Location icon or tap the More icon and then select Location.
2. You’ll see a map of your current location and the option to tap a blue bar to share your Live Location.
3. If you choose to share your Live Location with others, they can see where you are on a map for the next sixty minutes.
4. You’ll also see an estimate of how long it would take to get to others’ locations by car. (The ETA is seen by the person with whom the location is collective.)
5. You can stop sharing your Live Location at any time by tapping on Stop Sharing.

Five. You can now live stream from your computer

On March 22, Facebook announced in a blog post that live movie can now be broadcasted to news feeds from desktop and laptop computers.

Previously, the Live Movie was only available through Facebook’s mobile app.

As Facebook pointed out itself, a stable camera setup can be beneficial to many types of Facebook Live broadcasts — from Q&As to vlogs to tutorials. If you’re collaborating with bloggers, this skill might come in handy.

Moreover, the fresh live streaming capacities could be used to organize webinars right on Facebook – you can also incorporate on-screen graphics, titles, and overlays.

6. Facebook will launch private fundraisers

Facebook will soon let users raise money on behalf of themselves and others, as a way to help cover the cost of events like medical bills, tuition, and crises.

In a press release, the social media network said that, at very first, it only permits fundraisers across six aspects: education expenses, medical bills, pets’ medical bills, crisis and disaster ease, private emergencies, and assistance for families after a death.

The private fundraisers feature will roll out over the next few weeks to users in the US, only for those age eighteen and up.

Extra: Facebook’s testing Messenger-like comments format

As reported by The Brink, Facebook’s been making switches to the comments section on the Facebook mobile app, interchanging the plane line-by-line format with Messenger-like talk bubbles.

Replies also look similar to Messenger, with individual bubbles underneath the original comment.

Not everyone was glad about this update, especially some people reporting about this on Twitter.

Facebook told The Edge it’s testing the fresh layout with a “small percentage” of users, so if you’re not indeed into the fresh design, don’t worry —the format isn’t necessarily permanent.

However, it’s another sign of Facebook switching its platform into a more emotions-focused one.

Key takeaways:

Ok, let’s have a quick overview of the most significant Facebook news in April 2017.

1. Fresh insights in Facebook Ads Manager – You now get more predictions and insights about your ad campaign’s results.
2. Facebook introduced a fresh in-app camera – Fresh camera filters and frames provide fresh marketing opportunities for large brands.
3. Fresh Message Reactions for Facebook Messenger – Facebook’s messaging app is getting more comprehensive (and messy) with a regular introduction of fresh features.
4. Messenger got a fresh Live Location feature – You can now share your locations with friends so that they know when you’ll arrive.
5. You can now live stream from your computer – This means fresh possibilities for Q&As and on-Facebook webinars.
6. Facebook will launch a individual fundraisers feature – The social media network will help to support significant social causes.

Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments!

In case you missed our past months’ Facebook news broadcast, keep reading to find out what significant updates were introduced in the past year (month by month).

Top Facebook Updates That You Can’t Afford to Miss – March two thousand seventeen Edition

There’s a fresh wind deep throating in March, and it seems to carry the smell of Snapchat and movie ads…

Among other fascinating updates, Facebook introduced another reaction to Snapchat stories and ensured us that movie as a medium is growing at a rapid rhythm.

Here’s the list of the most significant Facebook news and updates in March 2017:

You still have time to catch up with the latest switches, and adjust your marketing strategy accordingly. Read away!

1. Facebook launched Messenger Day

Here’s big news for anyone loving Snapchat or Instagram Stories.

After several months of testing, Messenger Day, Facebook Messenger’s response to Snapchat Stories, was flipped out to users worldwide.

Messenger Day has the same features as Snapchat Stories, including stickers and filters, and posts disappearing after 24h.

Stan Chudnovsky, Head of Product for Messenger wrote in a blog post:

“Billions of photos and movies have been sent capturing all those heartfelt, funny and serious messages that make the Messenger community so powerful. We love watching how much joy people are having with Messenger’s fresh visual devices, especially our most popular art and effects like floating hearts and recently, Mardi Gras frames.”

How Messenger Day works:

1. Open Messenger, and tap the “Add to your day” button at the top of your inbox to get embarked.

Two. Snap a photo or movie of what’s around you.

Three. Add art and effects by tapping the smiley face icon in the top right and then tap to add to your photo or movie.

You can also add text over your pictures by tapping the “Aa” icon. To overlay a drawing, tap the squiggly line in the top right corner.

Four. Once you’ve finished editing, tap the arrow in the bottom right corner. You can add directly to your day, save it to your phone’s camera roll, and/or you can choose to send it to a specific person or group of people.

You can customize how you share by tapping the “more” icon and then choosing “Everyone Except” or “Custom.”

All your photos or movies will be viewable for twenty four hours.

You can also include a Messenger Day post in conversations. Simply tap that text, and you’ll be asked to confirm whether you’d like to add it to your day.

While there’s no Like counter, Messenger lets you instantly reply privately to a Day with custom-built or pre-filled messages like “haha”, “Wow”, a heart, or a “100” emoji that will emerge in your talk thread with that person.

To advertisers, this could mean fresh ad placements in the future.

Facebook’s VP of messaging David Marcus told TechCrunch that Messenger Day will “probably” insert advertisements inbetween posts to become one of Messenger’s very first revenue flows.

Two. Reactions coming to Messenger

On March Four, a TechCrunch reader sent the publisher a peak that Facebook Messenger is demonstrating some users a Reactions option.

In addition to the dislike, heart-eyes, lol, wow, sad, and angry emoji, users can also select inbetween a thumbs-up or thumbs-down Reaction.

As AdWeek put it: The fresh thumbs-down emoji is the closest Facebook has come to adding a dislike button.

Facebook confirmed the fresh feature to TechCrunch, telling:

“We’re always testing ways to make Messenger more joy and engaging. This is a puny test where we enable people to share an emoji that best represents their feelings on a message.”

This means that the Messenger Reactions aren’t yet spinned out to all users, but they soon might be.

The primary use case for the fresh Messenger Reactions is likely group talks, where more popular messages could be noted quicker with the help of emotional or thumbs-up emojis.

Facebook Reactions are one year old

Since their launch one year ago, Facebook Reactions have been used more than three hundred billion times.

The love Reaction has been by far the most popular, accounting for more than one-half of total Reactions.

Trio. Facebook introduced updates to Ad Violates

At the end of February, Facebook introduced and expanded three types of movie ads for both the social network and publishers’ websites.

Here’s a quick explanation about each update and what it means for Facebook advertisers.

1. In-stream movie ads on publisher websites can now be created via the Audience Network.

During a testing period, publishers like Univision and Collective Press eyed significant benefits of Audience Network in-stream movie ads.

Advertisers can upload their ads and bids to Facebook in advance so that algorithms can run an auction and produce Facebook users most relevant ads.

Here’s what Facebook’s movie Ad Violates look like:

To read more about Audience Network in-stream movie ads, see this guide.

Two. Ad Cracks feature for Facebook Live movies within Facebook’s own app is beta tested on extra profiles and Pages in the U.S.

Over the past few months, a puny group of movie creators has been testing Ad Violates to make money from their Facebook Live movies.

When a broadcaster chooses to take an ad break, people watching the movie will see an in-stream ad of up to fifteen seconds. The broadcaster will earn a share of the resulting ad revenue.

Three. Facebook is testing Ad Violates in on-demand movie.

The social media network commenced to test the Ad Violates feature in on-demand movie, permitting publishers to insert brief ad cracks into movies they upload, or into existing movies in their Facebook libraries.

This would mean more monetization opportunities for publishers and more Facebook movie ad placements for advertisers.

You can read more about each update here.

Four. Facebook autoplay movies will play with sound

Facebook mobile users will soon hear audio fading in as they scroll through movies in their News Feed. As people keep on scrolling and view the entire movie, the sound will get a bit louder on the phone until they scroll past the clip.

“After testing sound on in News Feed and hearing positive feedback, we’re leisurely bringing it to more people. With this update, sound fades in and out as you scroll through movies in News Feed, bringing those movies to life.”

A Facebook rep confirmed to AdWeek that the sound-on feature applies to “video ads and branded content movies in addition to regular organic movies.”

This means that mobile Facebook audiences will see your ads with sound, making it lighter to catch your audience’s attention. There will also be less need for subtitled movie ads.

Five. Facebook launched a VR app

On March 8, Facebook launched Facebook 360, a Samsung Gear VR app powered by Oculus, for the three hundred sixty movie and photo content posted on the social media platform.

With more than one million three hundred sixty movies posted to the site alongside more than twenty five million three hundred sixty photos, Facebook three hundred sixty will have slew of content to demonstrate.

Facebook three hundred sixty will feature four feeds:

• The “Explore” tab will give users a bird’s-eye look at the three hundred sixty content by selected publishers that is popular across Facebook.
• The “Following” tab will let you check out the photos and movies produced by your friends as well as three hundred sixty content from Pages and people you go after.
• The “Saved” tab gives an chance to practice three hundred sixty content that you’ve saved from the Facebook News Feed.
• The “Timeline” tab lets you check out your own three hundred sixty photos and movies all in one place.

Brent Ayrey, Product Director, and Christopher Wong, Software Engineer, wrote in a blog post:

“Today, we’re making three hundred sixty photos and movies even more immersive and lighter to detect with the launch of the Facebook three hundred sixty app for Samsung Gear VR, powered by Oculus. The app is an arousing fresh way to explore Facebook three hundred sixty photos and movies.”

To download the Facebook three hundred sixty app for Gear VR, open the Oculus app on your Gear VR-compatible Samsung device and search for Facebook 360, or visit the Oculus site to get embarked.

6. Facebook is working on extra ad measurement instruments

Facebook’s advanced measurement platform Atlas used to be available to only large advertisers.

Now, the social media network is planning to bring extra measurement capabilities to the Facebook Business Manager.

Product Marketing Director for Measurement Scott Shapiro said Facebook will be launching a fresh area of the Facebook Business Manager called Advanced Measurement, where it will be making Atlas capabilities available in a self-serve way.

In the future, the advanced reporting capacity will be available to ems of thousands of marketers using Facebook’s ad implements.

As reported by TechCrunch: The Advanced Measurement is presently in testing phase. Facebook plans to refine the interface and introduce more data as the fresh instrument rolls out sometime during this year.

7. Facebook users can now add flags to their profile pictures

If you like to support your national sports team or are in love with your country, here’s cool news: you can now add a puny flag icon to your Facebook profile picture.

Previously, Facebook has permitted users to use customized profile picture frames to express support for sports teams, causes, and movements.

Now, there are almost two hundred country flag frames in the list. You can see all the options and switch your profile picture framework here.

Smaller news:

Facebook is pushing record labels to let you soundtrack your movies – read more in this article by TechCrunch

Publishers can now place ads by hand within Facebook Instant Articles or choose inbetween three options for automatic placement: ads every 250, three hundred fifty or five hundred words. – read more from Facebook’s blog post

Quick recap:

Just in case, here’s a quick overview of all the topics covered in this news broadcast. Use it as a guideline when brainstorming fresh Facebook marketing ideas.

• Facebook launched Messenger Day
• Reactions coming to Messenger
• Facebook introduced updates to Ad Violates
• Facebook autoplay movies will play with sound
• Facebook launched a VR app
• Facebook is working on extra ad measurement devices
• Facebook users can add national flags to their profile pictures

In case you missed our past months’ Facebook news broadcast, keep reading to find out what significant updates were introduced in February 2017.

Top Facebook Updates That You Can’t Afford to Miss – February two thousand seventeen Edition

If January was the month of getting your Facebook Ads working on utter steam, February’s the month for analyzing and optimizing your ad campaigns to reach fresh heights.

February’s also been a busy news month for Facebook, bringing us fascinating updates on Facebook Stories, movie ads, and even GIFs.

As always, we’ve been digging for the latest Facebook news and we have investigated every promising lead.

As a result, just one click away, you’ll find a list of the Top Facebook updates in February 2017:

It’s time to grab a hefty cup of coffee, read about the latest Facebook news and, once you’re done, boost your Facebook ad results in just one hundred twenty minutes with these tips and our latest guide.

1. Facebook’s Q4 earnings report demonstrated excellent results

One thing’s for sure: Facebook keeps growing. But is it keeping up with its previous growth rate?

As reported by TechCrunch, Facebook had another strong quarter in Q4 2016, earning $8.81 billion in revenue. This represents a 53% hop from the same time last year.

During the past year, Facebook’s daily active users number rose 18% to 1.23 billion people. This means that you can potentially reach 18% more people on Facebook!

According to Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg:

“Facebook now has four million paying brands, along with another 500,000 on Instagram.”

Here are three more interesting Facebook stats to know:

• 65 million businesses are using Facebook Pages, and there are now over five million business profiles on Instagram.
• 400 million people use Facebook Messenger audio and movie calling each month
• The average price per Facebook ad rose three percent during the fourth quarter of 2016

Facebook Ads is a powerful advertising channel, but only if you drill your audience targeting and know how to evaluate your ad cost.

Two. You can now use GIFs in Facebook ads

We were super excited when reading about this in AdWeek and are looking to attempt out the fresh feature: Facebook now permits brands to include animated GIFs in their movie ads.

Affinitiv digital marketing specialist Chris Ruberg collective the screenshot below, displaying a pop-up atop the part of Facebook’s Ads Manager where brands would create movie ads.

You can either create GIFs yourself or use sites like GIPHY to find joy content.

You can also create a Facebook boosted post with an animated GIF:

• Add the link to the GIF you want to use to your post.
• Wait for the preview of your GIF to blast, and then post it to your Page.
• On your Page, click Boost Post.

Here’s an example of a Facebook GIF post by Buffer:

Facebook’s suggestions for the best results:

• Choose high-quality pics or animations
• Use a link ending with .gif
• Use a GIF with a file size less than 8MB
• Use a GIF with less than 20% text on the photo
• Avoid GIFs that flash or are grainy, as your boosted post may not be approved

GIFs, like movie ads, have the potential of returning higher click-through rates and a lower cost-per-click price. Using GIFs in your Facebook movie ads is undoubtedly worth a shot.

Three. Get more insight into your Movie Ads results

Facebook truly believes in the future of Movie Ads. The social media network recently announced that it’s adding fresh movie reporting options for a better overview of ad results.

Moreover, Facebook’s been working with their third-party verification playmates so that they, in turn, can bring better insights to marketers.

Now, you can see fresh in-view and duration metrics for your Movie Ads, including:

• Milliseconds that an ad was on the screen.
• Milliseconds that 50% of the ad was on the screen.
• Milliseconds that 100% of the ad was on the screen.

Significant! When creating movie ads, don’t leave behind to add captions. According to Facebook, captioned movie ads increase movie view time by an average of 12%. Another probe of Facebook movie ads discovered that 41% of movies were almost meaningless without sound.

Facebook also announced that it would introduce fresh buying options later this year across Facebook, Instagram and Facebook Audience Network:

1. Completed-view buying: Advertisers will only pay for movie ads that have been viewed entirely, for any duration up to ten seconds.
2. Two-second buying: Advertisers can buy movie ads according to Media Ratings Council criteria, which include two-second views where the movie is at least 50% on the screen.
3. Sound-on buying: Advertisers will be able to buy ads with an option to only pay when movies play with the sound on. Facebook movies typically showcase up in the News Feed on mute. Under fresh criteria, the views will only count when the volume is on.

Four. Facebook tests ad placement on Messenger’s home screen

On January 25, Facebook’s product manager Eddie Zhang announced in a blog post that the social network is testing ads on Messenger home screen. Advertisers will be able to place an ad in an area of Messenger below your latest conversations.

“Businesses have long been telling us that they are very excited about the potential of the Messenger platform to reach their customers and help them to drive sales, build brand awareness and increase customer satisfaction.”

The test is carried out in Australia and Thailand, and we’re excited to hear about the results.

This fresh ad placement could help brands to target the right users with the right promotions at the right time.

Five. Facebook’s been working on its News Feed algorithm

As reported by AdWeek, Facebook’s been working on improving its News Feed algorithm to bring users more timely and relevant content.

On January 31, Facebook announced that the aim with News Feed is to showcase people the stories that are most relevant to them.

These two updates will help to better rank posts in peoples’ feeds:

• Incorporating fresh signals to better identify and rank authentic content.
• Better predicting and ranking in real-time, delivering people more relevant posts.

With this update, Facebook’s emphasizing the need for authentic content.

Research scientists Akos Lada and James Li and engineering manager Shilin Ding described Facebook’s efforts to identify authentic content for News Feed:

“With this update, we’re adding fresh universal signals to determine whether a post might be authentic. To do this, we categorized pages to identify whether or not they were posting spam or attempting to game News Feed by doing things like asking for likes, comments or shares.”

For example, if page posts are often being hidden by people reading them, it’s a signal that it might not be relevant or authentic.

Moreover, if there is a lot of engagement from many people on Facebook about a topic, or if a post is getting a lot of engagement, Facebook’s algorithm will quickly understand that the topic might be temporarily more significant.

What this update means for Facebook marketers:

Facebook anticipates that most Pages won’t see any significant switches to their distribution in News Feed. Some Pages might see a petite increase in referral traffic or outbound clicks, and some Pages might see minor decreases.

The best formula to get your posts in front of your target audience is to post stories that are relevant to your audience.

Quick update: switches in trending topics:

Along with the News Feed switches, Facebook is also switching the Trending Topics section, removing personalization.

According to AdWeek, in order to make the Trending section more relevant, Facebook is switching how it identifies trending topics. While topics were highlighted in the past based on what users were engaging with on the platform, Facebook will now factor in the number of publishers posting about a given topic, combined with the user engagement.

6. Facebook Stories coming to the Facebook app

On January 25, TechCrunch reported that Facebook launched Facebook Stories in Ireland on iOS and Android, and plans to bring it to more countries in the coming months.

The Stories from a users’ friends will emerge on top of Facebook News Feed.

The company told TechCrunch:

“Facebook has long been the place to share with friends and family, but the way that people share is switching in significant ways. The way people share today is different to five or even two years ago — it’s much more visual, with more photos and movies than ever before. We want to make it swift and joy for people to share creative and expressive photos and movies with whoever they want, whenever they want.”

More on Facebook Stories: Facebook is developing animated selfie masks for brands

According to AdWeek, Facebook’s in talks to let several Hollywood studios promote big-budget movies using fresh animated masks on the social network.

Facebook Live already lets people use the filters to sync up special effects over their faces, but has not permitted brands to participate. Soon, there might be an option to boost your branded Facebook campaigns with a special selfie mask.

Quick recap:

Now that you’ve scanned through the latest Facebook news, here’s a quick overview of everything you’ve just read:

1. Facebook’s Q4 two thousand sixteen earnings report showcased continuing growth
2. You can now add GIFs to your Facebook ads
3. Facebook upgraded its movie reporting with extra metrics
4. Advertisers may soon be able to advertise on Facebook Messenger‘s home screen
5. News Feed algorithms got a serious boost & updates in Trending Topics
6. Facebook Stories keeps growing and improving, becoming an increasingly significant rival to Snapchat

If you missed our past Facebook news broadcasts, no worries, they’re all in this very same post, waiting to be discovered!

Keep reading to find out what updates were introduced by Facebook in January 2017.

Top Facebook Updates – January two thousand seventeen Edition

For this very first month of the year, there are fairly a few titillating updates that you don’t want to miss. Are you ready to dig in? Here’s a quick overview of the most significant Facebook news in January 2017:

1. Facebook Audience Network supplies ads to over a billion people

Since its launch in October 2014, the Facebook Audience Network has helped marketers to reach users outside of the social media platform.

While Facebook reached one billion users on its social network already some time ago, it now has more than one billion people viewing its advertising network. (That’s a yam-sized potential audience waiting to be reached!)

According to Facebook, the advertisers who opt-in to the Audience Network can reach 16% more people on average than they could by advertising on Facebook and Instagram.

If you haven’t used the Audience Network ad placement for reaching your audience, why not attempt it now. On average, advertisers have seen a 12% increase in conversions for website campaigns and a 17% increase in installs for mobile app campaigns when extending their Facebook ads to Audience Network.

How to advertise on the Audience Network:

To display your ads to people in the Facebook Audience Network, select this ad placement when setting up your Facebook ads.

Keep your eye on the results to evaluate whether to proceed advertising in the Audience Network in the future.

Two. You can now advertise in Instagram Stories

Successful Facebook advertising is often intertwined with Instagram. As you might have noticed, Facebook recently launched Instagram Stories which has been hugely popular since its launch.

On January 11, Facebook announced that it’s kicking off to let brands advertise in its 24-hour movie stories section. As reported by AdWeek, around thirty brands are already attempting the fresh full-screen ads. That includes Capital One, Asos, Nike, Buick and Airbnb.

One of the main advantages of Instagram ads over Snapchat is the ad technology and audience targeting. Snapchat’s ad platform is still developing while Instagram’s is built on top of Facebook.

The ads in Instagram Stories will be sold on the platform’s auction-style, automated system that charges cost-per-thousand-impressions rates. As it’s a brand fresh feature, Facebook’s still working on finding out the best practices, e.g. how many times to display an ad to users.

The Instagram Stories platform is steadily growing. On January 11, Instagram announced that the Stories feature is now used one hundred fifty million people every day. This represents a 50-million-user increase in just three months.

Three. Facebook is testing mid-roll ads

While this news wasn’t confirmed by Facebook when brought up by AdWeek, there’s a good chance we’ll soon have mid-roll ads on Facebook movies.

As reported by Recode, Facebook is going to begin displaying ads in the middle of its movies and sharing the money with publishers.

The mid-roll ad format means that ads will be inserted into movie clips after people have observed them for at least twenty seconds. Unlike other movie platforms, Facebook doesn’t permit to add pre-video ads to publishers’ content. The movies that contain ads also need to be at least ninety seconds long.

In 2016, Facebook users were watching movies for one hundred million hours per day. Mid-roll ads would mean that you could buy ads inwards unbranded movie content that’s relevant to your target audience.

Four. Reach more potential buyers with a fresh dynamic ads feature

Retargeting is one of the best ways to reach interested buyers with your Facebook campaigns. You can remind the right people at the right time about the right product.

Facebook is adding more and more options to target more and more people likely to be interested in your suggest. When using Facebook dynamic ads, advertisers can now reach people who are very likely to be interested in a specific product.

For example, a company could target people who have been looking for blue t-shirts across numerous retailers. Also, people who like Facebook posts and pages about t-shirts could be served an ad about a blue t-shirt. The person doesn’t need to visit your website, simply display interest in a product similar to yours.

“Now, if someone has been browsing for furniture across numerous websites, Facebook may infer that this person is interested in buying a couch, and they may be a good candidate to serve a dynamic ad for furniture.”

How the dynamic ads update works:

Similar to dynamic ads, Facebook advertisers very first upload a catalog of products that they would like to promote. Next, they select an audience they’d like to target, e.g. dudes in the UK.

After you’ve created a campaign, Facebook’s algorithms embark to work their magic, looking at traffic patterns on retailers’ mobile sites and apps to automatically serve a targeted promotion to relevant users.

Right now, dynamic ads are only available for US brands, but Facebook is planning to include other regions in the coming months.

Five. You can now listen to Live Audio content on Facebook

If you’re a fan of podcasts and other audio content, there’s a fresh way to use it in your Facebook marketing strategy.

At the end of December, Facebook launched a fresh feature – Live Audio. The feature lets users listen to broadcast voice recordings, encouraging people to publish more audio-only content.

Here’s how Facebook Live Audio works:

Facebook Live Audio works similarly to Live Movie. Users can go live from the Facebook app by pressing a button. Once a recording starts, Facebook creates a post using a Page cover pic. People can see the recording in their news feeds and listen to the audio content.

For Android users, audio will also play if a user leaves the Facebook app to use another app or locks their phone.

As Facebook’s representatives said: “From interviews to book readings, we’re excited about the layer of interactivity that Live Audio brings to both the broadcaster and listener.”

6. Facebook Journalism Project

After an election year of fake news controversies on social media platforms, Facebook is taking serious steps for improving the news content.

On January 11, Facebook announced Facebook Journalism Project, a collaboration with publishers and journalists to improve the quality of online news.

According to Fidji Simo, product manager in Facebook:

“We will be collaborating with news organizations to develop products, learning from journalists about ways we can be a better playmate, and working with publishers and educators on how we can equip people with the skill they need to be informed readers in the digital age.”

Lately, Facebook has taken steps to reduce the spread of news hoaxes, including ways for people to report them more lightly, to disrupt the financial incentives for spammers, and to work with third-party fact-checking organizations.

Facebook is even launching a series of e-courses for journalists to detect content and engage with readers on Facebook and Instagram.

7. Coming soon: updated Instant Articles

If you’re in the publishing business or work with Facebook Instant Articles, here’s what you need to know: Facebook is testing a way for publishers to combine numerous Instant Articles into one post.

Here’s how it works:

When a user clicks on an Instant Article from a publisher, they will be able to swipe through numerous unrelated stories instead of just one.

If you like the story, you can choose to share a post, save it for later, open it in Safari or post it to other channels like Twitter or email.

Conclusion

Alright, it’s time to wrap up this newscast and head to design some ads for Instagram Stories.

Here’s a quick recap of all the Facebook news in January 2017:

1. Ads in the Facebook Audience Network reach over one billion people
2. Facebook might soon launch mid-roll ads in movies
3. Advertisers are now able to reach more potential buyers with dynamic ads
4. We can all soon advertise inbetween Instagram Stories
5. Facebook Journalism Project was launched
6. You can now listen to Live Audio content on Facebook
7. Coming soon: updated Instant Articles

And now… get back to work! But just in case you think you might have missed some of the big updates of the past year… click here, we have them covered!!

Top Facebook Updates That You Can – t Afford to Miss – August two thousand seventeen Edition

Academy

August 14, two thousand seventeen 22 Comments Andrew Tate

Do you want to know one of the secrets that make Facebook the giant it is? The guys at Menlo Park never go on vacay!

In this August 2017, Facebook introduced some fresh ad targeting options, put a stop to slow-loading links, and is rolling out better reporting for movie re-shares and ad campaign metrics.

As always, we’ve done the hard work for you and collected all the top Facebook news you need to know right now.

Want more? Click read more then!

Here are the Ten Facebook Updates you can’t miss in August 2017:

Are you ready? Find a cozy spot, grab a drink and here we go!

1. Facebook will add event RSVPs as an ad targeting option.

Facebook plans to let advertisers send targeted ads to RSVPers of Facebook events.

This event-based targeting works by creating a Facebook Custom-built Audience of everyone who RSVP’d to an event created by the brand’s Facebook Page. Using the Custom-built Audience feature, brands can send a targeted campaign to the list of RSVPers and use the RSVP list to create a Facebook Lookalike audience of similar users.

With this RSVP targeting feature, brands will be able to include users who RSVP’d as “going,” users who RSVP’d as “interested,” or include both groups in their Custom-built Audience list.

Facebook events were already an effortless way for companies to promote their brand, but with this fresh RSVP ad targeting option, Facebook events will be an even better platform for building brand interest.

Two. Faster-loading links will be placed higher on mobile News Feeds.

Facebook announced that they will prioritize links that geyser swifter on mobile News Feeds, causing these stories to emerge more frequently at the top of the feed and slower stories to emerge less often.

Users’ network connection, Wi-Fi capability, and device usage will be taken into consideration to estimate link blast times and which News Feed content should be prioritized.

Facebook will roll out this update leisurely in the coming months. And if you’re worried about this update decreasing your webpage shares, check out Facebook’s guidelines for improving mobile site flow time.

Trio. Facebook has eliminated their apps Lifestage and Groups.

Facebook has shut down two of their stand-alone apps: Lifestage and Groups.

Introduced one year ago, Lifestage was designed for teenagers to connect with others at their school by creating personalized movie profiles. Users could also view movies made by others at their school.

The Facebook app Groups was a bit older than Lifestage, launching in November 2014. The app served as a space for users to access all of their Facebook groups in one place. Users could also create fresh Facebook Groups from the app.

With these app shutdowns, Facebook is honing in on their main Facebook app. In their responses to these app removals, the company explained that they’re focusing more on Groups in the main Facebook app, and plan to incorporate their learnings from Lifestage into the main Facebook app.

Four. Facebook is updating their clicks and ad impression reporting.

To give companies a clearer understanding of their ad spectacle, Facebook has updated its reporting on clicks and ad impressions.

Facebook will no longer be counting unintentional clicks in campaign metrics and will not be charging for unintentional clicks in Audience Network, its platform for Facebook to run ads in other apps. Explaining this update, Facebook Product Marketing Manager Brett Vogel noted that, “unintentional clicks end up delivering indeed poor practices for people and advertisers.”

To determine if a click is unintentional, Facebook measures the “drop off rate” — the time a user spends on an ad’s landing page. Facebook identifies spending less than two seconds on an ad as an unintentional click.

Facebook has also updated their ad impression reporting to give businesses more clarity on their total number of ad impressions with two fresh metrics:

• Gross impressions: this metric now measures both billable and non-billable ad impressions. Non-billable impressions include ads delivered after a company’s budget was spent, ads served to the same user in a brief time, and ad delivery due to detectable fraud.
• Auto-refresh impressions: this metric indicates the number of ad impressions due to a browser refresh. Ads that are placed on the right-hand side of a user’s desktop News Feed automatically refresh with fresh ads after a set period of time.

With these fresh metrics, Facebook is suggesting more transparency about ad delivery, permitting users to feel certain about the value of their ad impressions.

Five. Facebook is updating movie re-share metrics to give creators better insights.

After gathering user feedback, Facebook learned that movie creators desired more metrics on re-shares of their content as well as limitations on the amount of metrics movie re-sharers could see. In response, Facebook made some updates to movie re-share metrics:

• Only movie creators will be able to see the following metrics: retention graph, average observe time, thirty Seconds Views and detailed breakdown of views (autoplay/click to play, unique/repeat). Minutes viewed, ten Seconds Views and sound metrics will soon only be available to creators as well.

• Page owners who re-share movies will be permitted to see the following metrics: aggregated information about the demographics, general location of the people who are viewing that movie, daily views of the re-shared movie, and extra breakdowns on paid versus organic movie activity.
• Facebook will be adding insights for movie creators on which Pages are re-sharing their movie, however they have not specified the insights yet.

With these re-share metric updates, users will be able to form stronger insights about their posting strategy and content creation.

6. Facebook announced their 2nd Quarter two thousand seventeen results.

Facebook reported strong 2nd quarter results with sales growth that surpassed analysts’ estimates. The positive report can be attributed to the enlargening request for Facebook’s mobile ads and Facebook’s success in consistently bringing on fresh users through its suite of apps.

• Revenue rose 45% to $9.32 billion from $6.43 billion in last year’s 2nd quarter.
• Mobile ad revenue represented 87% of total ad sales, up from 84% in the same period last year.
• Profits enhanced 71% to $Three.89 billion from last year’s 2nd quarter profit of $Two.28 billion.
• Daily active users were 1.32 billion on average and monthly active users were two billion on average — both metrics displayed a 17% year-over-year increase.

Facebook stated that “ad load” (the number of ads Facebook shows users) will become less of a revenue growth source this year. For future revenue growth sources, analysts predict that Facebook’s long-term investments in messaging and virtual reality will become substantial revenue flows.

7. Facebook is testing “going live” features from Facebook Camera.

To make it lighter for users to go live with movie and audio, Facebook is releasing a test version of Facebook Movie that includes the abilities to record live audio and movie, and to make GIFs.

With this fresh test version of Facebook Movie, the functions “Live,” “Normal,” and “GIF” will emerge as tabs across the top of the screen.

On the “Live” tab, you can tap on a movie camera icon to live stream movie or a microphone icon to live stream audio.

Plus, you’ll now be able to choose whether you want to go live in just your Facebook Stories, as a regular Facebook post, or both.

For now, these Facebook Movie live features are only being tested and have not been fully flipped out to users.

8. Facebook is testing adding Stories to the desktop site.

As a test, Facebook Stories will now be available on the desktop site to some users on the right side of the News Feed.

Emulating Snapchat, Facebook Stories is a feed of friends’ pictures and movies from the last twenty four hours.

Facebook had already included Stories in their main mobile app, but so far the feature hasn’t received too much attention. In April, Facebook Stories attempted to encourage users to add to their story more by greying out icons of users who weren’t using the feature, but Facebook Stories still hasn’t fairly caught on.

Facebook hasn’t confirmed the percentage of users that are observing Stories on their desktop for this test, so it’s unclear for now as to whether adding Facebook Stories to desktop will increase its usage.

9. Facebook is rolling out more Messenger ads globally.

After running limited tests that introduced ads to Facebook Messenger’s home tab, Facebook has announced that it’s expanding a test of home tab ads in the Messenger app globally.

Facebook has stated that they will step by step increase the number of consumers who will be able to see the ads in the Messenger home tab.

Once clicked on, the fresh Messenger home tab ads will either lead users to a website or work like the older Click to Message ads, which begin a message thread inbetween the user and the company when clicked.

Ads represent a major chunk of Facebook’s revenue, so it makes sense that Facebook is adding Messenger home tab ads (there’s only so much News Feed ad space). Users may find the ads alongside their individual messages on the Messenger home tab too intrusive, but if so they will be given the option to hide ads by clicking on the ad’s bottom right downward arrow.

Ten. Facebook is introducing two fresh movie platforms, Observe and Showcase Pages.

Facebook is substituting its old Movie tab with a fresh platform called See, a space for Facebook users to see shows. Shows on Facebook are published movie series of gigs, live or recorded.

Observe will have a Watchlist feature to help users keep track of the shows that they go after, plus Observe will organize shows into personalized sections, like “What Friends are Watching,” to help users detect fresh shows. Users will also be able to connect with other viewers by commenting and reacting to shows or by joining dedicated Facebook Groups for shows.

See is presently only available to a limited group of people in the US on mobile, desktop, and Facebook TV apps, but will be released to more people in the US in the coming weeks.

As a complement to See, Facebook is also releasing Demonstrate Pages, which are Pages for users to publish fresh showcase scenes, information about the display, and related movies.

With these Demonstrate Pages, users will lightly be able to connect with the communities forming around each demonstrate.

Quick Recap:

Let’s review the most significant Facebook news in August 2017:

In case you missed the top news in previous months, scroll down to read about them!

Top Facebook Updates That You Can’t Afford to Miss – July two thousand seventeen Edition

In July 2017, Facebook introduced joy features for Messenger movie talk, added updates to Safety Check and it is providing Group admins more control over their communities.

As always, we’ve done the hard work for you and collected all the top Facebook news you need to know right now. So sit back, grab an iced espresso and click read more!

Here’s a quick overview of the most significant Facebook news in July 2017:

Ready? Let’s go then

1. Group admins will have more control over their communities.

Facebook is adding several features to help Group admins manage their members and grow their teams.

The fresh instruments will provide admins with a better understanding of member activity and more control over Group membership and posting.

The updates include:

• Group insights — Admins will be able to see real-time metrics about growth, engagement and membership, like the total number of Group posts and most popular times of member engagement.
• Membership request filtering — Membership requests will be sorted into categories like gender or location, so admins can accept or decline requests by categories all at once.
• Eliminated member clean-up — Admins will be able to liquidate Group members and their created content in one step.
• Scheduled posts — Group admins and moderators will be able to create and schedule posts.
• Group to group linking — Facebook is testing group-to-group linking, which permits admins to suggest similar groups to their members.

With their fresh community-oriented mission, Facebook plans to proceed developing instruments for supporting Group admins.

Two. Facebook Messenger’s Detect tab went live.

After announcing Detect at F8, Facebook has spinned out v 1.1 for users in the US.

With Detect, users can interact with bots, places, and businesses on Messenger. You can browse by category, recently visited businesses and featured practices.

Facebook wrote on their company blog:

Detect makes it even lighter to get things done, from reading the latest articles, booking your next vacation, or getting the latest sport highlights, right in Messenger.”

What this means for advertisers:

According to Marketing Land, the “recently used” category on Detect will only include businesses that users have messaged, not businesses that users have followed on Facebook Pages or other social media platforms.

This means that businesses will need to promote their Messenger accounts with ads and hope that their accounts are featured in other categories, like topic-related sections and the “Featured” practices.

Trio. Messenger Ads are Going Global

If you’re reading us from Australia or Thailand we’re not telling you anything fresh, but if you live anywhere else on this planet you can get ready to add a fresh instrument to your marketing arsenal: Messenger Ads!

After more than one year of testing, now businesses around the world can extend their reach to people in Messenger. Are 1.Two billion monthly Messenger users enough for you?

Messenger ads will display up with a “sponsored” label in the home tab of Messenger mobile app and they look like a typical News Feed ads with a headline, description copy, picture and calls to act. When users tap on an ad, they will be sent to the destination you selected when creating the ads (your website or a Messenger chatbot).

You’ll find Messenger ads as a placement option, and if you’re using automatic placements Messenger is included for all supported campaign objectives. Messenger ads are available in Ads Manager and Power Editor and advertisers will be able to add Messenger to campaigns using the Traffic and Conversion objectives.

In the next few weeks, more options are rolling out, the guys at Facebook assure that App Installs and other campaign objectives will be supported “soon.”

Four. Find Wi-Fi around the world (and find your business too)

After being released to several countries last year, Find Wi-Fi is now available worldwide.

The implement permits users to find the closest Wi-Fi hot catches sight of based on businesses who have collective their Wi-Fi through their Facebook Page.

To access “Find Wi-Fi,” they only need to open the Facebook app, click on the “More” tab and then “Find Wi-Fi.” They can also search through the map to find available hotspots and learn more details about the businesses providing Wi-Fi.

Do we indeed have to tell you all the benefit that your free Wi-Fi can give to your business?

Five. Facebook will suggest fresh metrics for Ad and Page insights.

Facebook has announced the fresh metrics they will be releasing for businesses over the next few weeks.

These metrics are designed to give companies a better understanding of user interactions with their Facebook Ads and Pages.

Here are the fresh metrics on ad interactions:

• Landing page views — Shows the number of visitors who reached your website after clicking on an ad.
• Pre-impression activity breakdown — Shows whether visitors have been to your website previously.

With these two metrics, businesses can determine if ads are successfully leading users to their sites and attracting fresh customers.

Here are the fresh metrics on Page interactions:

• Goes after —Shows the number of goes after a business gains or loses, insights into where goes after happen, follower demographics and a breakdown of organic and paid goes after.
• Previews —Shows the number of people who see your Page’s information without actually clicking on it.
• Recommendations —Shows the number of times your Page is included in a Facebook recommendation

Facebook plans on releasing more fresh metrics every month based on the feedback they get on these metrics. Just make sure your treatment is data-informed, not data-driven!

6. Facebook News Feed algorithm was updated to reduce spam.

Facebook has switched their News Feed algorithm to reduce the amount of spam on users’ News Feeds.

Unlike Facebook’s clickbait targeting updates last month, this algorithm update will detect spammers by the total number of posts, not by individual post content. According to Tech Times, Facebook identifies anyone sharing fifty or more posts per day as someone who is most likely sharing spam or fake news.

In a June thirty blog post, Facebook representatives said that:

“Our research further shows that the links they share tend to include low quality content such as clickbait, sensationalism, and misinformation. As a result, we want to reduce the influence of these spammers and deprioritize the links they share more frequently than regular sharers.”

For now, this de-prioritization rule only applies to posts with links, not domains, Pages, movies, photos, check-ins or status updates.

But there’s more!

Do you usually switch the title or the pic when you share a link on Facebook? Well, embarking July seventeen (and for the next #wedontknowhowmany weeks), you will not able to do it anymore. Facebook is removing the capability to edit a link preview – its pic, title, and text – before sharing a link on the platform.

Are you mad? Well, then send a thank you note to all those spammers, scammers, and clickbaiters that have been using link preview editing as a way to post false news.

What if your workflow relies on overwriting link preview metadata? Facebook announced that they’re working to find a solution and, in the next few weeks, will provide publishers with “tools and resources” to support them. Waiting for a solution, there are a few tricks that you can use right now.

7. Fresh profile picture implements were launched in India.

Facebook’s research displayed that some users don’t post a profile picture because they worry it will be misused online.

To help users feel more comfy posting profile pictures, the company is testing fresh protective profile picture instruments in India.

The very first contraption is an optional profile picture guard. With this feature, users are able to:

• restrict others from downloading, sharing or sending your profile picture in a Facebook message
• restrict others from taking screenshots of your profile picture (presently only available on Android app)
• restrict non-Facebook friends from tagging others or themselves in your profile picture

The optional guard also adds a blue layer and shield to your profile picture to signal protection to other users.

The 2nd implement is the option to add a design layer to profile pics.

According to tests, people are 75% less likely to copy a profile picture with a design layer.

Inspired by Indian textile patterns, such as Bandhani and Kantha, illustrator Jessica Singh created the designs for Indian users to add to their profile pictures. Can you imagine a future where thousands of users will pick your designs for their profile picture?

8. Facebook Safety Check got numerous updates.

Speaking of Facebook’s commitment to communities, the company is rolling out several updates to Safety Check.

Safety Check has always permitted users to let family and friends know they are okay during moments of crisis. Now, Safety Check will also include:

• Fundraisers —Users in the US will now be able to embark a fundraiser through Safety Check.
• Community Help — The Community Help feature is now available on desktop and will be available for all types of crises where Safety Check is activated.
• Adding individual notes — To keep friends and family updated, users can now add individual notes that are automatically added to their News Feed story.
• Crisis descriptions — Safety Check now includes info about crises from the global crisis reporting agency NC4.

Facebook very first released Safety Check two years ago. For the past two years, Safety Check has been activated more than six hundred times and has sent more than a billion safety notifications. It’s already a powerful device, and the fresh features will only make connecting with users lighter.

9. Facebook Messenger introduced fresh joy movie features.

Until now, movie talking on Messenger has been pretty bare-bones. Recently, Facebook added several features to amp up the joy factor.

These fresh contraptions permit you to add animated reactions, filters, masks, and effects to movie talks, and take screenshots of your talks.

Here are a few pro-tips for using the fresh movie talking features:

• Emojis — When you add emojis to animate on your movie screen, observe closely! The effects switch depending on whether your face is on or off screen.
• Filters —Not sure if you look good? Test the filter before letting others see it.
• Masks — Some of the masks have hidden effects when you budge. Attempt opening your mouth with the rabbit mask…

For Messenger movie talk users, the fresh emojis, masks, and filters should inspire some laughs from friends and family. For business, they will make your interaction way more private. Flawless for connecting to millennials, it needs to be used with care with the rest of your audience.

Quick recap:

Take another sip of your iced espresso and let’s review the most significant Facebook news in July 2017:

In case you missed the top news in previous months, scroll down to read about them!

Top Facebook Updates That You Can’t Afford to Miss – June two thousand seventeen Edition

In this June 2017, Facebook introduced some fresh ad formats, ramped up its battle against clickbait, and it is (ultimately) providing advertisers more control over their ad placements. As always, we’ve done the hard work for you and collected all the top Facebook news you need to know right now.

Here’re the 12 Facebook Updates you can’t miss in June 2017:

1. Advertisers Get More Control Over Ad Placements

Facebook will launch some fresh devices to provide advertisers more control over their ad placements in Audience Network, Instant Articles and In-Stream Ads.

Over the next few months, the ad network will launch extra controls to let advertisers exclude some ad placements by blocking lists of publishers & apps.

According to a blog article by Facebook:

We will begin suggesting upfront, publisher-level transparency across the Audience Network, Instant Articles and in-stream ads on Facebook.”

• Higher pre-campaign transparency – Advertisers will be able to see a list of where their ads could potentially supply prior to setting a campaign live
• Blocking placements at the account level – It will be lighter to prevent ads from appearing in undesirable places by applying block lists at the account level
• Choice over movie placements in Facebook Audience Network – Advertisers will get a choice of the types of movie placements and the formats (e.g. in-stream, native, and interstitial) they can use

The social network will proceed to build the contraptions advertisers need to make them feel sated with the level of transparency and control they have over their ad campaigns.

Two. You Can Now Create Full-Width Ads for the Audience Network

On May 25, Facebook announced that they’re adding a fresh full-width ads format for Facebook Audience Network, its mobile advertising network.

According to a Facebook’s probe, full-width ads enlargened the ads’ user engagement (CTR) by 58% and monetization (CPM) by 34%.

The fresh full-width ad format is now available to all mobile web publishers on Audience Network through header bidding.

Three. Facebook Will Have Stricter Rules Against Clickbait

To help its users see fewer clickbait stories and find more authentic ones, Facebook recently made three fresh updates.

Clickbait targeting is now done on an individual post level, not only on the domain and page level. To make the decrease of clickbait more effective, Facebook will look separately whether a post’s headline withholds or exaggerates information.

Moreover, to clean up its social network, all of these algorithm updates are also tested in foreign languages. At the moment, Facebook can detect and downrank clickbait headlines in German, Arabic, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Thai, Vietnamese, and Chinese as well as English.

For advertisers and publishers, the update could mean that posting clickbait news isn’t a good strategy for engaging a large Facebook audience.

Instead, we suggest that you concentrate on creating value for your audience above any other purpose.

Four. Facebook Is Testing Video-format Cover Pics

For some time now, Facebook has collaborated with selected brands to test using video-format cover photos.

As reported by AdWeek, Facebook has been working with Netflix and Flixel Photos to experiment with the fresh cover pic style.

Presently, the video-format cover picture isn’t available to all brands. However, once the fresh feature will be spinned out globally, you should go after these specs to create a successful cover movie:

1. Cover movies must be at least twenty seconds long, but no more than ninety seconds long
2. The recommended movie crop size is eight hundred twenty pixels by four hundred sixty two pixels
3. Cover movies should auto-play and auto-loop
4. Page admins can upload cover movies the same way they presently upload cover photos

Five. You Can Optimize Who Sees Your Facebook Posts

While this feature’s been available for some time now, we figured you may have missed the chance.

Every time you publish a fresh Facebook post, you’ll be able to use the Audience Optimization, to ensure the right people will see your Facebook page posts.

Once you click on the Audience Optimization icon when publishing a Facebook page post, a fresh pop-up window will emerge.

You’ll be able to select which interests you’d like to particularly target with this specific post.

For example, AdEspresso was to share a Facebook Advertising Guide on AdEspresso’s Facebook page, they could optimize this post’s audience by targeting “Facebook advertising” and “Advertising” interests.

If your Facebook page has more than Five,000 likes, the Audience Optimization has already been activated and the device should be available for you to use.

If your page has fewer than Five,000 likes, here’s what to do:

• Click the “Settings” tab in the top right corner of your Facebook page
• From the “General” tab, you’ll see a row for “Audience Optimization for Posts”
• Click on “Edit” and check the box to activate the Audience Optimization
• Then, go with the “Save Changes” button.

6. Facebook Added Fresh Canvas Ads Templates & Other Updates

On June 7, AdWeek reported that Facebook introduced three fresh templates for Canvas Ads: Get Fresh Customers, Sell Products and Showcase Your Businesses.

Here’s a brief overview of each fresh Canvas Ads format:

1. Get Fresh Customers – Bring your stories from websites and landing pages over to Canvas to nurture interest in a friction-free style and drive customers to convert.
2. Sell Products – Enable discovery and purchase of products and services in a visual and immersive way.
3. Showcase Your Business – Drive brand awareness by combining the power of engaging movies and photos.

Moreover, Facebook Canvas Ads can now be included in Collection Ads.

On top of that, it will be lighter to create fresh Canvas Ads as Facebook will automatically pull all pictures from your landing pages, along with their associated destination links.

7. You Can Now Create Value-based Lookalike Audiences

Facebook recently introduced two fresh solutions that help advertisers to target users who are more likely to take valuable deeds after interacting with their campaigns.

According to a blog post by Facebook, the value optimization works by using the purchase values sent from the Facebook pixel to estimate how much a person may spend with your business over a seven-day period. Your ad’s bid is then automatically adjusted based on this estimation, permitting campaigns to produce ads to people likely to spend more with your business at a low cost.

Moreover, you can now create Lookalike Audiences based on Custom-built Audiences that include the data about your customers’ expected lifetime value.

The fresh Facebook advertising features will be spinned out globally in the upcoming months.

8. Facebook Live Is Getting Numerous Updates

To filter the visual spam and have more meaningful and private reactions to Live movies, Facebook flipped out a few innovative solutions in the past month: Live Talk with Friends and Live With.

In addition to the Live Talk with Friends feature that permits users to have private conversations during their live broadcasts, Facebook is launching a feature that will let you go live with another friend in a side-by-side conversation. This feature was previously available to public figures, but now, it’s rolling out worldwide, permitting you to argue or talk with friends in a Live setting.

As reported by TechCrunch, the social network is already testing this feature in a few countries and it will be more widely available later this summer.

For advertisers, the fresh Live With feature could present a fresh set of opportunities for broadcasting interviews, courses or webinars right in the Facebook news feed.

9. Facebook Added GIFs Into Comments

As ofJune 15, every Facebook user can use GIFs in the comments.

This feature was added to feast the 30th anniversary of the GIF format. Marketers can search GIFs by using different services, like Giphy and Tenor, then post them in the comments box, in Facebook Messenger or in status updates.

As stated by TheVerge, the busiest day for GIFs was evidently January 1st this year, with more than four hundred million GIFs sent.

Ten. Facebook Messenger Just Got a Facelift

Facebook flipped out a visual update to Messenger for improving navigation across the application.

The fresh Messenger home screen still has its Stories feature and Messenger Day, but the emphasis is placed on connecting with all the people and businesses more quickly.

At the top bar, there are tabs for Messages, Active, and Groups. The bottom bar features tabs for Home, Calls, People, and Games. Facebook also added a crimson dot that will help to catch up on unseen messages, calls and any other fresh activity.

According to Facebook’s Head of Messenger David Marcus, Messenger will soon have a fresh, Detect tab, also located at the bottom bar. These switches simplify messaging and the Messenger home screen leisurely starts to make sense again.

11. Facebook Introduced Fresh Photo Album Features

As reported by AdWeek, Facebook announced an album total of updates to its photo album feature,

Facebook photo albums now also support movies, check-ins, and text posts. Moreover, people can exhibit their beloved album on their profile page by using the Featured Albums contraption.

According to TechCrunch, the fresh feature essentially lets you create digital scrapbooks of all kinds of content. That raises the question of whether Facebook will begin letting you create, print, and buy physical photo books the way Google does now.

12. Facebook Trending Topics Now Display More Stories

At the end of May, Facebook introduced a redesigned Trending results page.

Now, when clicking through to a Trending Topic, Facebook will demonstrate you a carousel of the other most popular articles written about the subject by different publishers.

Facebook product manager Ali Ahmadi and designer John Angelo wrote in a blog post:

“By making it lighter to see what other news outlets are telling about each topic, we hope that people will feel more informed about the news in their region.”

Right now, people can see the fresh results page on iPhone in the US. However, Facebook’s planning to make it available on Android and desktop soon.

Furthermore, Facebook announced that it is making its Instant Articles platform adaptable with Google AMP and Apple News. So, if you build once in Instant Articles, it is lighter to use them on other platforms and stylizing the article won’t be a problem anymore.

Quick Overview

Congratulations! You’ve reached the end of this month’s Facebook news broadcast.

Here’s a quick recap of everything you just read:

In case you missed some of the past months’ Facebook updates, scroll down to read all of them! But very first, leave us a comment

Top Facebook Updates That You Can’t Afford to Miss – May two thousand seventeen Edition

So here they are – the top Facebook updates in May 2017:

1. Facebook held the F8 conference
2. Facebook advanced its marketing analytics
3. There are now 1.94 billion monthly active users on Facebook
4. You can now play games in the Messenger app
5. Facebook is cleaning up the News Feed
6. Facebook Dynamic Ads are now even more powerful
7. You can now ask entry questions for Facebook Groups

Ready to see how you can benefit from all these updates?

1. Facebook held the F8 conference

The F8 conference was clearly the largest Facebook news in April.

During the 2-day conference, Facebook introduced some gravely titillating fresh products and collective their future plans with thousands ofeager listeners.

A lot of emphasis was placed on the development of VR and AI products, including the launch of a fresh Camera Effects platform and a VR app named Facebook Spaces.

In case you fully missed out on the conference, we’re going to cover some if the most significant announcements right away.

We also covered the F8 conference here on AdEspresso’s blog. Read the utter coverage here: Facebook F8 two thousand seventeen – What Marketers Need to Know

Two. Facebook advanced its marketing analytics

Facebook’s ad reporting is already one of the most insightful and accurate paid advertising measurement implements.

By tracking the right Facebook ad metrics, you’ll be able to optimize your campaigns and improve both your ads’ click-through rates and acquisition costs.

Now, advertisers can track the Facebook Page interactions, such as post reactions and shares in the omnichannel analytics for websites, applications, services, and bots.

For example, an e-commerce business can measure if people who comment on an item featured in their Page post go on to view that item on their website or purchase it in their app.

But there’s more to it: Facebook also introduced a fresh AI-powered Automated Insights instrument that’s especially beneficial to larger advertisers who need to segment their target audiences.

If you’re marketing a product that’s sold in physical stores, the fresh multi-channel analytics can help you better realize the ROI of your campaigns.

Learn more about the Facebook Analytics multi-channel tracking here.

Trio. There are now 1.94 billion monthly active users on Facebook

On May Trio, Facebook released its very first quarter earnings report.

As a Facebook advertiser, you can rest assured – the social media platform’s not going anywhere.

As reported by The Brink, the social media platform brought in just over $8 billion in revenue, a leap of forty nine percent since the very first quarter of 2016.

Moreover, the number of Facebook’s monthly active users has grown by 17% compared to the very first quarter of 2016. And so has Instagram’s: the company just announced that it hit the milestone of seven hundred million monthly active users.

This is good news for anyone looking to reach a large audience of potential customers via paid social media advertising.

Four. You can now play games in the Messenger app

On May Two, Facebook announced that its fresh Messenger game-playing feature is now available to 1.Two billion people using the app every month.

The fresh games feature, named Instant Games, is available on Messenger and Facebook News Feed for both mobile and web.

According to Facebook, the fresh games practice permits people to lightly detect, share, and play games without having to install fresh apps.

The gaming platform also lets game makers create turn-based plays, to integrate leaderboards and tournaments.

Right now, there are fifty different titles to play, from Pac-Man to eight Ball Pool.

As reported by TechCrunch: For now, there are no ads or in-game purchases available, so neither Facebook nor developers are making money on the Instant Games platform just yet.

What this means for advertisers:

The Messenger games could also provide awesome branding opportunities for advertisers. In fact, there are already some branded games like The LEGO Batman Movie’s Bat Climb on the platform.

Five. Facebook is cleaning up the News Feed

Due to the latest problem of fake news, Facebook’s taking extra steps to clean up our News Feeds from low-quality ads and posts.

In a blog update published on May Ten, Facebook’s representatives told that:

“Starting today, we’re rolling out an update so people see fewer posts and ads in News Feed that link to these low-quality web page practices. Similar to the work we’re already doing to stop misinformation, this update will help reduce the economic incentives of financially-motivated spammers.”

Facebook analyzed hundreds of thousands of web pages linked to from Facebook to identify those that contain little substantive content and have a large number of disruptive, shocking or malicious ads.

What this means for advertisers:

The switches will roll out little by little over the upcoming months.

If you’re promoting high-quality landing pages with nothing spammy, you may even see a puny increase in traffic as you can potentially be contesting with fewer advertisers for your audience’s attention.

6. Facebook Dynamic Ads are now even more powerful

Facebook Dynamic Ads let advertisers create remarketing ads based on the person’s browsing history on a website.

For example, if a person visits an eCommerce website, they could be retargeted with a multi-product ad of the exact products they looked at.

With the latest update, you can highlight up to twenty photos from a catalog to represent a single item across the carousel ad format used with Dynamic Ads.

This means that you can advertise a single item such as a chunk of clothing, recipe, hotel or destination with numerous photos, making your remarketing ads even more efficient.

If you don’t have a large product catalog and aren’t using the Dynamic Ads, you might still be interested in our guide to the best Facebook (remarketing) audiences.

7. Fresh entry questions for Facebook Groups

If you’re an admin of one or several Facebook groups, the following might be a nice surprise for you!

You can now setup up to three questions for people requesting to join their Group to response.

As reported by TechCrunch, this lets admins screen potential members to ensure they’re the right fit for the group and will add constructively to the discussion, not just spam or troll the Group.

The answers and questions will only be seen by admins and moderators (don’t worry, no answers will be posted to the group).

If you’re managing a branded Facebook community, this could also be a good chance to ask about your audience’s interests and expectations, so that you can have even better discussions in the future.

Quick recap

You’ve reached the end of this month’s news broadcast.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing – it means you can now go and apply your fresh skill to your Facebook ad campaigns.

Just in case, here’s a quick overview of the top Facebook news in May 2017:

1. Facebook held the F8 conference
2. Facebook advanced its marketing analytics
3. There are now 1.94 billion monthly active users on Facebook
4. You can now play games in the Messenger app
5. Facebook is cleaning up the News Feed
6. Facebook Dynamic Ads are now even more powerful
7. Fresh entry questions for Facebook Groups

If you’d like to read even more about the latest updates, see our article on the F8 conference.

And in case you missed the top news in April, scroll down to read about them!

Top Facebook Updates That You Can’t Afford to Miss – April two thousand seventeen Edition

If you’re able to uncover a fresh awesome targeting method or use GIFs in your Movie Ads before anyone else, you’ll win big. Are you ready to win big this month?

Here’s a quick overview of Facebook updates in April 2017:

Alright, let’s see how each of these updates can help you engage with your Facebook audiences and increase sales.

1. Facebook added fresh insights to ad reports

The reports you see in the Facebook Ads Manager, displaying your campaign results and helping to optimize campaigns, just got an update.

Facebook is making your predicted ad results more see-through with Delivery Insights and Estimated Daily Results.

The redesigned Delivery Insights dashboard now features an updated interface that provides in-depth auction metrics and helps to interpret the fluctuations in your campaign spectacle.

The fresh auction overlap device will help you interpret whether overlapping audiences inbetween ad sets might be affecting your spend and audience saturation.i

In addition to that, Facebook also updated their ad results prediction, providing advertisers a better overview of future campaign results. When setting up campaign budgets, you can now see a table with predicted ad delivery and reach.

Two. Facebook introduced a fresh in-app camera

If you’re still not 100% wooed that Facebook believes in live movie and Messenger Day, read this:

You can now tap on the camera icon on the top left corner of your Facebook mobile app or swipe right from News Feed to attempt out Facebook’s fresh in-app camera.

The Facebook in-app camera is packed with dozens of effects like masks, frames and interactive filters that you can apply to your photos and movies – to make them more joy.

What this means for advertisers:

Facebook’s also partnering with brands to create masks for upcoming movies Alien: Covenant, Despicable Me Trio, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. Two, Power Rangers, Smurfs: The Lost Village and Wonder Woman.

But Facebook has even fatter plans for their fresh camera.

According to Connor Hayes, Product Manager:

“Over the coming months, we plan to introduce fresh ways for the Facebook community to create their own frames and effects that can be used on any photo or movie created with the fresh Facebook camera. Our aim is for the camera to be a home to hundreds of dynamic and joy effects that give you fresh ways to connect with friends, family, and your community.”

We’re excited to see how brainy brands can use the fresh features to their advantage!

Three. Fresh Message Reactions for Facebook Messenger

On March 23, Drew Moxon, Product Manager, Messenger, wrote on Facebook’s blog that they’ve added two fresh features that improve group conversations to make them more joy and useful.

The fresh feature is called Messenger Reactions.

Message Reactions let people react to individual messages with specific emotions – love, smile, wow, sad, angry, yes, and no.

This lets people to quickly display acknowledgment or express how they feel about a particular message.

You’ll be able to see how people have reacted to a message in the lower corner of the message. If you don’t presently have the Messenger open, you’ll receive a notification that lets you know who (and how) reacted to your messages.

There’s another fresh feature in Facebook Messenger – Mentions.

To mention someone, type the “@” symbol or begin typing the very first letters of a person’s name you want to notify. Next, select them from the list.

When you’re mentioned, instead of simply witnessing that someone responded in the conversation, you’ll receive a special notification telling you were called out specifically.

In fact, Facebook’s so in with emojis that this year, they want to award advertisers whose ads have stirred emotions.

As reported by AdAge, Facebook’s switching its ad awards this year, asking agencies for their best work in categories named Laugh, Sob, Wow, Love and Act, mimicking the react button options on Facebook posts.

You can submit your entries here.

Four. Facebook Messenger got a fresh Live Location feature

On March 27, Facebook introduced a improvised live location sharing feature inwards Messenger, letting friends and family track your movements an hour at a time.

This could be handy when you’re late to a meetup, letting your friends know you’re on your way.

How the Live Location feature works:

1. To share your Live Location in a message on iOS, tap the Location icon or tap the More icon and then select Location. For Android, tap the Location icon or tap the More icon and then select Location.
2. You’ll see a map of your current location and the option to tap a blue bar to share your Live Location.
3. If you choose to share your Live Location with others, they can see where you are on a map for the next sixty minutes.
4. You’ll also see an estimate of how long it would take to get to others’ locations by car. (The ETA is seen by the person with whom the location is collective.)
5. You can stop sharing your Live Location at any time by tapping on Stop Sharing.

Five. You can now live stream from your computer

On March 22, Facebook announced in a blog post that live movie can now be broadcasted to news feeds from desktop and laptop computers.

Previously, the Live Movie was only available through Facebook’s mobile app.

As Facebook pointed out itself, a stable camera setup can be beneficial to many types of Facebook Live broadcasts — from Q&As to vlogs to tutorials. If you’re collaborating with bloggers, this skill might come in handy.

Moreover, the fresh live streaming capacities could be used to organize webinars right on Facebook – you can also incorporate on-screen graphics, titles, and overlays.

6. Facebook will launch private fundraisers

Facebook will soon let users raise money on behalf of themselves and others, as a way to help cover the cost of events like medical bills, tuition, and crises.

In a press release, the social media network said that, at very first, it only permits fundraisers across six aspects: education expenses, medical bills, pets’ medical bills, crisis and disaster ease, private emergencies, and assistance for families after a death.

The private fundraisers feature will roll out over the next few weeks to users in the US, only for those age eighteen and up.

Extra: Facebook’s testing Messenger-like comments format

As reported by The Brink, Facebook’s been making switches to the comments section on the Facebook mobile app, interchanging the vapid line-by-line format with Messenger-like talk bubbles.

Replies also look similar to Messenger, with individual bubbles underneath the original comment.

Not everyone was blessed about this update, especially some people reporting about this on Twitter.

Facebook told The Brink it’s testing the fresh layout with a “small percentage” of users, so if you’re not truly into the fresh design, don’t worry —the format isn’t necessarily permanent.

However, it’s another sign of Facebook switching its platform into a more emotions-focused one.

Key takeaways:

Ok, let’s have a quick overview of the most significant Facebook news in April 2017.

1. Fresh insights in Facebook Ads Manager – You now get more predictions and insights about your ad campaign’s results.
2. Facebook introduced a fresh in-app camera – Fresh camera filters and frames provide fresh marketing opportunities for large brands.
3. Fresh Message Reactions for Facebook Messenger – Facebook’s messaging app is getting more comprehensive (and messy) with a regular introduction of fresh features.
4. Messenger got a fresh Live Location feature – You can now share your locations with friends so that they know when you’ll arrive.
5. You can now live stream from your computer – This means fresh possibilities for Q&As and on-Facebook webinars.
6. Facebook will launch a private fundraisers feature – The social media network will help to support significant social causes.

Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments!

In case you missed our past months’ Facebook news broadcast, keep reading to find out what significant updates were introduced in the past year (month by month).

Top Facebook Updates That You Can’t Afford to Miss – March two thousand seventeen Edition

There’s a fresh wind throating in March, and it seems to carry the smell of Snapchat and movie ads…

Among other fascinating updates, Facebook introduced another response to Snapchat stories and ensured us that movie as a medium is growing at a rapid rhythm.

Here’s the list of the most significant Facebook news and updates in March 2017:

You still have time to catch up with the latest switches, and adjust your marketing strategy accordingly. Read away!

1. Facebook launched Messenger Day

Here’s big news for anyone loving Snapchat or Instagram Stories.

After several months of testing, Messenger Day, Facebook Messenger’s reaction to Snapchat Stories, was spinned out to users worldwide.

Messenger Day has the same features as Snapchat Stories, including stickers and filters, and posts disappearing after 24h.

Stan Chudnovsky, Head of Product for Messenger wrote in a blog post:

“Billions of photos and movies have been sent capturing all those heartfelt, funny and serious messages that make the Messenger community so powerful. We love watching how much joy people are having with Messenger’s fresh visual instruments, especially our most popular art and effects like floating hearts and recently, Mardi Gras frames.”

How Messenger Day works:

1. Open Messenger, and tap the “Add to your day” button at the top of your inbox to get embarked.

Two. Snap a photo or movie of what’s around you.

Three. Add art and effects by tapping the smiley face icon in the top right and then tap to add to your photo or movie.

You can also add text over your photos by tapping the “Aa” icon. To overlay a drawing, tap the squiggly line in the top right corner.

Four. Once you’ve finished editing, tap the arrow in the bottom right corner. You can add directly to your day, save it to your phone’s camera roll, and/or you can choose to send it to a specific person or group of people.

You can customize how you share by tapping the “more” icon and then choosing “Everyone Except” or “Custom.”

All your photos or movies will be viewable for twenty four hours.

You can also include a Messenger Day post in conversations. Simply tap that text, and you’ll be asked to confirm whether you’d like to add it to your day.

While there’s no Like counter, Messenger lets you instantly reply privately to a Day with custom-built or pre-filled messages like “haha”, “Wow”, a heart, or a “100” emoji that will show up in your talk thread with that person.

To advertisers, this could mean fresh ad placements in the future.

Facebook’s VP of messaging David Marcus told TechCrunch that Messenger Day will “probably” insert advertisements inbetween posts to become one of Messenger’s very first revenue flows.

Two. Reactions coming to Messenger

On March Four, a TechCrunch reader sent the publisher a peak that Facebook Messenger is showcasing some users a Reactions option.

In addition to the dislike, heart-eyes, lol, wow, sad, and angry emoji, users can also select inbetween a thumbs-up or thumbs-down Reaction.

As AdWeek put it: The fresh thumbs-down emoji is the closest Facebook has come to adding a dislike button.

Facebook confirmed the fresh feature to TechCrunch, telling:

“We’re always testing ways to make Messenger more joy and engaging. This is a puny test where we enable people to share an emoji that best represents their feelings on a message.”

This means that the Messenger Reactions aren’t yet spinned out to all users, but they soon might be.

The primary use case for the fresh Messenger Reactions is likely group talks, where more popular messages could be noted quicker with the help of emotional or thumbs-up emojis.

Facebook Reactions are one year old

Since their launch one year ago, Facebook Reactions have been used more than three hundred billion times.

The love Reaction has been by far the most popular, accounting for more than one-half of total Reactions.

Three. Facebook introduced updates to Ad Cracks

At the end of February, Facebook introduced and expanded three types of movie ads for both the social network and publishers’ websites.

Here’s a quick explanation about each update and what it means for Facebook advertisers.

1. In-stream movie ads on publisher websites can now be created via the Audience Network.

During a testing period, publishers like Univision and Collective Press spotted significant benefits of Audience Network in-stream movie ads.

Advertisers can upload their ads and bids to Facebook in advance so that algorithms can run an auction and produce Facebook users most relevant ads.

Here’s what Facebook’s movie Ad Violates look like:

To read more about Audience Network in-stream movie ads, see this guide.

Two. Ad Violates feature for Facebook Live movies within Facebook’s own app is beta tested on extra profiles and Pages in the U.S.

Over the past few months, a puny group of movie creators has been testing Ad Cracks to make money from their Facebook Live movies.

When a broadcaster chooses to take an ad break, people watching the movie will see an in-stream ad of up to fifteen seconds. The broadcaster will earn a share of the resulting ad revenue.

Trio. Facebook is testing Ad Violates in on-demand movie.

The social media network embarked to test the Ad Cracks feature in on-demand movie, permitting publishers to insert brief ad cracks into movies they upload, or into existing movies in their Facebook libraries.

This would mean more monetization opportunities for publishers and more Facebook movie ad placements for advertisers.

You can read more about each update here.

Four. Facebook autoplay movies will play with sound

Facebook mobile users will soon hear audio fading in as they scroll through movies in their News Feed. As people keep on scrolling and view the entire movie, the sound will get a bit louder on the phone until they scroll past the clip.

“After testing sound on in News Feed and hearing positive feedback, we’re leisurely bringing it to more people. With this update, sound fades in and out as you scroll through movies in News Feed, bringing those movies to life.”

A Facebook rep confirmed to AdWeek that the sound-on feature applies to “video ads and branded content movies in addition to regular organic movies.”

This means that mobile Facebook audiences will see your ads with sound, making it lighter to catch your audience’s attention. There will also be less need for subtitled movie ads.

Five. Facebook launched a VR app

On March 8, Facebook launched Facebook 360, a Samsung Gear VR app powered by Oculus, for the three hundred sixty movie and photo content posted on the social media platform.

With more than one million three hundred sixty movies posted to the site alongside more than twenty five million three hundred sixty photos, Facebook three hundred sixty will have slew of content to display.

Facebook three hundred sixty will feature four feeds:

• The “Explore” tab will give users a bird’s-eye look at the three hundred sixty content by selected publishers that is popular across Facebook.
• The “Following” tab will let you check out the photos and movies produced by your friends as well as three hundred sixty content from Pages and people you go after.
• The “Saved” tab gives an chance to practice three hundred sixty content that you’ve saved from the Facebook News Feed.
• The “Timeline” tab lets you check out your own three hundred sixty photos and movies all in one place.

Brent Ayrey, Product Director, and Christopher Wong, Software Engineer, wrote in a blog post:

“Today, we’re making three hundred sixty photos and movies even more immersive and lighter to detect with the launch of the Facebook three hundred sixty app for Samsung Gear VR, powered by Oculus. The app is an titillating fresh way to explore Facebook three hundred sixty photos and movies.”

To download the Facebook three hundred sixty app for Gear VR, open the Oculus app on your Gear VR-compatible Samsung device and search for Facebook 360, or visit the Oculus site to get began.

6. Facebook is working on extra ad measurement instruments

Facebook’s advanced measurement platform Atlas used to be available to only large advertisers.

Now, the social media network is planning to bring extra measurement capabilities to the Facebook Business Manager.

Product Marketing Director for Measurement Scott Shapiro said Facebook will be launching a fresh area of the Facebook Business Manager called Advanced Measurement, where it will be making Atlas capabilities available in a self-serve way.

In the future, the advanced reporting capacity will be available to ems of thousands of marketers using Facebook’s ad contraptions.

As reported by TechCrunch: The Advanced Measurement is presently in testing phase. Facebook plans to refine the interface and introduce more data as the fresh instrument rolls out sometime during this year.

7. Facebook users can now add flags to their profile pictures

If you like to support your national sports team or are in love with your country, here’s cool news: you can now add a puny flag icon to your Facebook profile picture.

Previously, Facebook has permitted users to use customized profile picture frames to express support for sports teams, causes, and movements.

Now, there are almost two hundred country flag frames in the list. You can see all the options and switch your profile picture framework here.

Smaller news:

Facebook is pushing record labels to let you soundtrack your movies – read more in this article by TechCrunch

Publishers can now place ads by hand within Facebook Instant Articles or choose inbetween three options for automatic placement: ads every 250, three hundred fifty or five hundred words. – read more from Facebook’s blog post

Quick recap:

Just in case, here’s a quick overview of all the topics covered in this news broadcast. Use it as a guideline when brainstorming fresh Facebook marketing ideas.

• Facebook launched Messenger Day
• Reactions coming to Messenger
• Facebook introduced updates to Ad Violates
• Facebook autoplay movies will play with sound
• Facebook launched a VR app
• Facebook is working on extra ad measurement implements
• Facebook users can add national flags to their profile pictures

In case you missed our past months’ Facebook news broadcast, keep reading to find out what significant updates were introduced in February 2017.

Top Facebook Updates That You Can’t Afford to Miss – February two thousand seventeen Edition

If January was the month of getting your Facebook Ads working on utter steam, February’s the month for analyzing and optimizing your ad campaigns to reach fresh heights.

February’s also been a busy news month for Facebook, bringing us fascinating updates on Facebook Stories, movie ads, and even GIFs.

As always, we’ve been digging for the latest Facebook news and we have investigated every promising lead.

As a result, just one click away, you’ll find a list of the Top Facebook updates in February 2017:

It’s time to grab a gigantic cup of coffee, read about the latest Facebook news and, once you’re done, boost your Facebook ad results in just one hundred twenty minutes with these tips and our latest guide.

1. Facebook’s Q4 earnings report displayed excellent results

One thing’s for sure: Facebook keeps growing. But is it keeping up with its previous growth rate?

As reported by TechCrunch, Facebook had another strong quarter in Q4 2016, earning $8.81 billion in revenue. This represents a 53% leap from the same time last year.

During the past year, Facebook’s daily active users number rose 18% to 1.23 billion people. This means that you can potentially reach 18% more people on Facebook!

According to Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg:

“Facebook now has four million paying brands, along with another 500,000 on Instagram.”

Here are three more interesting Facebook stats to know:

• 65 million businesses are using Facebook Pages, and there are now over five million business profiles on Instagram.
• 400 million people use Facebook Messenger audio and movie calling each month
• The average price per Facebook ad rose three percent during the fourth quarter of 2016

Facebook Ads is a powerful advertising channel, but only if you fuck your audience targeting and know how to evaluate your ad cost.

Two. You can now use GIFs in Facebook ads

We were super excited when reading about this in AdWeek and are looking to attempt out the fresh feature: Facebook now permits brands to include animated GIFs in their movie ads.

Affinitiv digital marketing specialist Chris Ruberg collective the screenshot below, displaying a pop-up atop the part of Facebook’s Ads Manager where brands would create movie ads.

You can either create GIFs yourself or use sites like GIPHY to find joy content.

You can also create a Facebook boosted post with an animated GIF:

• Add the link to the GIF you want to use to your post.
• Wait for the preview of your GIF to flow, and then post it to your Page.
• On your Page, click Boost Post.

Here’s an example of a Facebook GIF post by Buffer:

Facebook’s suggestions for the best results:

• Choose high-quality pictures or animations
• Use a link ending with .gif
• Use a GIF with a file size less than 8MB
• Use a GIF with less than 20% text on the photo
• Avoid GIFs that flash or are grainy, as your boosted post may not be approved

GIFs, like movie ads, have the potential of returning higher click-through rates and a lower cost-per-click price. Using GIFs in your Facebook movie ads is certainly worth a shot.

Three. Get more insight into your Movie Ads results

Facebook truly believes in the future of Movie Ads. The social media network recently announced that it’s adding fresh movie reporting options for a better overview of ad results.

Moreover, Facebook’s been working with their third-party verification playmates so that they, in turn, can bring better insights to marketers.

Now, you can see fresh in-view and duration metrics for your Movie Ads, including:

• Milliseconds that an ad was on the screen.
• Milliseconds that 50% of the ad was on the screen.
• Milliseconds that 100% of the ad was on the screen.

Significant! When creating movie ads, don’t leave behind to add captions. According to Facebook, captioned movie ads increase movie view time by an average of 12%. Another explore of Facebook movie ads discovered that 41% of movies were almost meaningless without sound.

Facebook also announced that it would introduce fresh buying options later this year across Facebook, Instagram and Facebook Audience Network:

1. Completed-view buying: Advertisers will only pay for movie ads that have been viewed entirely, for any duration up to ten seconds.
2. Two-second buying: Advertisers can buy movie ads according to Media Ratings Council criteria, which include two-second views where the movie is at least 50% on the screen.
3. Sound-on buying: Advertisers will be able to buy ads with an option to only pay when movies play with the sound on. Facebook movies typically demonstrate up in the News Feed on mute. Under fresh criteria, the views will only count when the volume is on.

Four. Facebook tests ad placement on Messenger’s home screen

On January 25, Facebook’s product manager Eddie Zhang announced in a blog post that the social network is testing ads on Messenger home screen. Advertisers will be able to place an ad in an area of Messenger below your latest conversations.

“Businesses have long been telling us that they are very excited about the potential of the Messenger platform to reach their customers and help them to drive sales, build brand awareness and increase customer satisfaction.”

The test is carried out in Australia and Thailand, and we’re excited to hear about the results.

This fresh ad placement could help brands to target the right users with the right promotions at the right time.

Five. Facebook’s been working on its News Feed algorithm

As reported by AdWeek, Facebook’s been working on improving its News Feed algorithm to bring users more timely and relevant content.

On January 31, Facebook announced that the objective with News Feed is to display people the stories that are most relevant to them.

These two updates will help to better rank posts in peoples’ feeds:

• Incorporating fresh signals to better identify and rank authentic content.
• Better predicting and ranking in real-time, delivering people more relevant posts.

With this update, Facebook’s emphasizing the need for authentic content.

Research scientists Akos Lada and James Li and engineering manager Shilin Ding described Facebook’s efforts to identify authentic content for News Feed:

“With this update, we’re adding fresh universal signals to determine whether a post might be authentic. To do this, we categorized pages to identify whether or not they were posting spam or attempting to game News Feed by doing things like asking for likes, comments or shares.”

For example, if page posts are often being hidden by people reading them, it’s a signal that it might not be relevant or authentic.

Moreover, if there is a lot of engagement from many people on Facebook about a topic, or if a post is getting a lot of engagement, Facebook’s algorithm will quickly understand that the topic might be temporarily more significant.

What this update means for Facebook marketers:

Facebook anticipates that most Pages won’t see any significant switches to their distribution in News Feed. Some Pages might see a petite increase in referral traffic or outbound clicks, and some Pages might see minor decreases.

The best formula to get your posts in front of your target audience is to post stories that are relevant to your audience.

Quick update: switches in trending topics:

Along with the News Feed switches, Facebook is also switching the Trending Topics section, removing personalization.

According to AdWeek, in order to make the Trending section more relevant, Facebook is switching how it identifies trending topics. While topics were highlighted in the past based on what users were engaging with on the platform, Facebook will now factor in the number of publishers posting about a given topic, combined with the user engagement.

6. Facebook Stories coming to the Facebook app

On January 25, TechCrunch reported that Facebook launched Facebook Stories in Ireland on iOS and Android, and plans to bring it to more countries in the coming months.

The Stories from a users’ friends will show up on top of Facebook News Feed.

The company told TechCrunch:

“Facebook has long been the place to share with friends and family, but the way that people share is switching in significant ways. The way people share today is different to five or even two years ago — it’s much more visual, with more photos and movies than ever before. We want to make it rapid and joy for people to share creative and expressive photos and movies with whoever they want, whenever they want.”

More on Facebook Stories: Facebook is developing animated selfie masks for brands

According to AdWeek, Facebook’s in talks to let several Hollywood studios promote big-budget movies using fresh animated masks on the social network.

Facebook Live already lets people use the filters to sync up special effects over their faces, but has not permitted brands to participate. Soon, there might be an option to boost your branded Facebook campaigns with a special selfie mask.

Quick recap:

Now that you’ve scanned through the latest Facebook news, here’s a quick overview of everything you’ve just read:

1. Facebook’s Q4 two thousand sixteen earnings report showcased continuing growth
2. You can now add GIFs to your Facebook ads
3. Facebook upgraded its movie reporting with extra metrics
4. Advertisers may soon be able to advertise on Facebook Messenger‘s home screen
5. News Feed algorithms got a serious boost & updates in Trending Topics
6. Facebook Stories keeps growing and improving, becoming an increasingly significant rival to Snapchat

If you missed our past Facebook news broadcasts, no worries, they’re all in this very same post, waiting to be discovered!

Keep reading to find out what updates were introduced by Facebook in January 2017.

Top Facebook Updates – January two thousand seventeen Edition

For this very first month of the year, there are fairly a few titillating updates that you don’t want to miss. Are you ready to dig in? Here’s a quick overview of the most significant Facebook news in January 2017:

1. Facebook Audience Network produces ads to over a billion people

Since its launch in October 2014, the Facebook Audience Network has helped marketers to reach users outside of the social media platform.

While Facebook reached one billion users on its social network already some time ago, it now has more than one billion people viewing its advertising network. (That’s a phat potential audience waiting to be reached!)

According to Facebook, the advertisers who opt-in to the Audience Network can reach 16% more people on average than they could by advertising on Facebook and Instagram.

If you haven’t used the Audience Network ad placement for reaching your audience, why not attempt it now. On average, advertisers have seen a 12% increase in conversions for website campaigns and a 17% increase in installs for mobile app campaigns when extending their Facebook ads to Audience Network.

How to advertise on the Audience Network:

To showcase your ads to people in the Facebook Audience Network, select this ad placement when setting up your Facebook ads.

Keep your eye on the results to evaluate whether to proceed advertising in the Audience Network in the future.

Two. You can now advertise in Instagram Stories

Successful Facebook advertising is often intertwined with Instagram. As you might have noticed, Facebook recently launched Instagram Stories which has been hugely popular since its launch.

On January 11, Facebook announced that it’s beginning to let brands advertise in its 24-hour movie stories section. As reported by AdWeek, around thirty brands are already attempting the fresh full-screen ads. That includes Capital One, Asos, Nike, Buick and Airbnb.

One of the main advantages of Instagram ads over Snapchat is the ad technology and audience targeting. Snapchat’s ad platform is still developing while Instagram’s is built on top of Facebook.

The ads in Instagram Stories will be sold on the platform’s auction-style, automated system that charges cost-per-thousand-impressions rates. As it’s a brand fresh feature, Facebook’s still working on finding out the best practices, e.g. how many times to display an ad to users.

The Instagram Stories platform is steadily growing. On January 11, Instagram announced that the Stories feature is now used one hundred fifty million people every day. This represents a 50-million-user increase in just three months.

Three. Facebook is testing mid-roll ads

While this news wasn’t confirmed by Facebook when brought up by AdWeek, there’s a good chance we’ll soon have mid-roll ads on Facebook movies.

As reported by Recode, Facebook is going to begin displaying ads in the middle of its movies and sharing the money with publishers.

The mid-roll ad format means that ads will be inserted into movie clips after people have observed them for at least twenty seconds. Unlike other movie platforms, Facebook doesn’t permit to add pre-video ads to publishers’ content. The movies that contain ads also need to be at least ninety seconds long.

In 2016, Facebook users were watching movies for one hundred million hours per day. Mid-roll ads would mean that you could buy ads inwards unbranded movie content that’s relevant to your target audience.

Four. Reach more potential buyers with a fresh dynamic ads feature

Retargeting is one of the best ways to reach interested buyers with your Facebook campaigns. You can remind the right people at the right time about the right product.

Facebook is adding more and more options to target more and more people likely to be interested in your suggest. When using Facebook dynamic ads, advertisers can now reach people who are very likely to be interested in a specific product.

For example, a company could target people who have been looking for blue t-shirts across numerous retailers. Also, people who like Facebook posts and pages about t-shirts could be served an ad about a blue t-shirt. The person doesn’t need to visit your website, simply display interest in a product similar to yours.

“Now, if someone has been browsing for furniture across numerous websites, Facebook may infer that this person is interested in buying a couch, and they may be a good candidate to serve a dynamic ad for furniture.”

How the dynamic ads update works:

Similar to dynamic ads, Facebook advertisers very first upload a catalog of products that they would like to promote. Next, they select an audience they’d like to target, e.g. studs in the UK.

After you’ve created a campaign, Facebook’s algorithms commence to work their magic, looking at traffic patterns on retailers’ mobile sites and apps to automatically serve a targeted promotion to relevant users.

Right now, dynamic ads are only available for US brands, but Facebook is planning to include other regions in the coming months.

Five. You can now listen to Live Audio content on Facebook

If you’re a fan of podcasts and other audio content, there’s a fresh way to use it in your Facebook marketing strategy.

At the end of December, Facebook launched a fresh feature – Live Audio. The feature lets users listen to broadcast voice recordings, encouraging people to publish more audio-only content.

Here’s how Facebook Live Audio works:

Facebook Live Audio works similarly to Live Movie. Users can go live from the Facebook app by pressing a button. Once a recording starts, Facebook creates a post using a Page cover pic. People can see the recording in their news feeds and listen to the audio content.

For Android users, audio will also play if a user leaves the Facebook app to use another app or locks their phone.

As Facebook’s representatives said: “From interviews to book readings, we’re excited about the layer of interactivity that Live Audio brings to both the broadcaster and listener.”

6. Facebook Journalism Project

After an election year of fake news controversies on social media platforms, Facebook is taking serious steps for improving the news content.

On January 11, Facebook announced Facebook Journalism Project, a collaboration with publishers and journalists to improve the quality of online news.

According to Fidji Simo, product manager in Facebook:

“We will be collaborating with news organizations to develop products, learning from journalists about ways we can be a better playmate, and working with publishers and educators on how we can equip people with the skill they need to be informed readers in the digital age.”

Lately, Facebook has taken steps to reduce the spread of news hoaxes, including ways for people to report them more lightly, to disrupt the financial incentives for spammers, and to work with third-party fact-checking organizations.

Facebook is even launching a series of e-courses for journalists to detect content and engage with readers on Facebook and Instagram.

7. Coming soon: updated Instant Articles

If you’re in the publishing business or work with Facebook Instant Articles, here’s what you need to know: Facebook is testing a way for publishers to combine numerous Instant Articles into one post.

Here’s how it works:

When a user clicks on an Instant Article from a publisher, they will be able to swipe through numerous unrelated stories instead of just one.

If you like the story, you can choose to share a post, save it for later, open it in Safari or post it to other channels like Twitter or email.

Conclusion

Alright, it’s time to wrap up this newscast and head to design some ads for Instagram Stories.

Here’s a quick recap of all the Facebook news in January 2017:

1. Ads in the Facebook Audience Network reach over one billion people
2. Facebook might soon launch mid-roll ads in movies
3. Advertisers are now able to reach more potential buyers with dynamic ads
4. We can all soon advertise inbetween Instagram Stories
5. Facebook Journalism Project was launched
6. You can now listen to Live Audio content on Facebook
7. Coming soon: updated Instant Articles

And now… get back to work! But just in case you think you might have missed some of the big updates of the past year… click here, we have them covered!!

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